I feel like I can’t go on social media anymore without being told I’m living my life wrong or should give up on my hopes and dreams.

Shouting, weirdly accusatory diagnoses abound within every other YouTube thumbnail or Substack title:

This is why you’re unhappy.

Your Skincare Routine Isn’t Working. Here’s Why.

You’re doing your laundry WRONG

This is the death of the publishing industry.

You Don’t Want Love—You Want to Feel Worthy

Posts like these irritate me even more than the problematically sensationalistic headlines we see in the news, where at least I can feel bad about real things, like skyrocketing rent or a body found in a river. My frustration, I’ve learned after plenty of pondering and angrily scrolling away, is with the presumption of expertise—the arrogance that is required for one person to make a sweeping conclusion about their entire audience, then claim they have the solution to everybody’s problem.

I’m not sure why this phenomenon surprises me. Every day, people spout nonsense on the internet despite having no business doing so, whether it involves diagnosing strangers with mental illnesses on Twitter or a cis dude telling a literal gynecologist that she’s using the incorrect term for female anatomy. The relative anonymity of the internet—and the limited consequences for pissing someone off there—makes it easy to act like you know more than you actually do.

There’s also a definitiveness I’m not a fan of, a pretending that whoever is writing a headline has the final say on their topic of choice. Elle Griffin’s infamous Substack post, No one will read your book, claims to offer many “truths about publishing,” though she has no actual experience working in the publishing industry. (She also gave a TedX talk about “why serialization is the future of publishing.” Is serializing one novel sufficient experience to make such a sweeping generalization? I suppose you could make an argument either way.) Substacker Michael O. Church’s post, AI Can Save Literature, and Publishing Can’t, also claims he is “one of the world’s leading experts on the question of whether AI can read or write literary fiction.” A hyperlink tucked into that phrase seems to lend legitimacy to his claim, but all it does is lead to another Substack diatribe in which he claims his computer programming and writing experience is sufficient to, you know, predict the death of literary publishing.

Is it a coincidence that both of these essays feature such morose titles? Of course not. Panic drives engagement. So does the illusion of certainty.

Journalists do this, too, even when they ostensibly make a good-faith effort to base their claims on reputable sources. It’s one of the many reasons I left my job as Southwest parks editor at SFGATE: The publication was increasingly using explosively definitive headlines for the sake of engagement, even when the story itself acknowledged there was a little more nuance than the headline let on. Journalism is in a tough spot these days, and it’s understandable that an outlet would do whatever it could to stay afloat, but I felt deeply uncomfortable with the way these headlines exacerbated an increasingly polarized and emotionally-driven media landscape. (Some headlines were offensive on a personal level, too. One in particular, One of Earth’s oldest plants sits in the Calif. desert, and no one cares, made me cry. Of course the journalist responsible hadn’t actually looked for anyone who cared, like yours truly, who has the plant tattooed on her arm; that wouldn’t have made for such a snappy story.)

To an extent, I get it. A title that uses second-person POV but openly acknowledges nuance and variability would be clunky and unmotivating: A Few Journal Prompts to Try When Your Life Totally Sucks1 or 5 laundry hacks that might finally get the Yellowbird hot sauce stain out of the T-shirt you got while volunteering that one time.

In a way, perhaps it’s a good thing that the onslaught of AI-generated content is pushing outlets to publish pieces under first-person POV headlines that imply a real human is actually involved: Querying a novel is the hardest thing I’ve ever done or I Tried 19 New Ice Cream Flavors, and This Is My Favorite. At least these remind readers that an article or essay can only truly reflect one person’s experience (or, at most, an experience shared by a cohort of people) rather than pretending to speak for literally everyone.

One of the funniest things my dad ever did during one of our many political arguments was imply that his laissez-faire stance on COVID-19 was just as valid as the much more concerned perspective held by epidemiology experts, because he, too, had read “the charts and graphs and data.”2 Of course, when I asked where those incredibly vague sources had come from, he couldn’t say; he just insisted that he had “done his research” before landing at his conclusion, which, if I’m being honest, was giving Lord Farquaad.

“I’ve done my research” is a common refrain on Reddit, in Twitter/X replies, and in Instagram comments, where people whose perspectives are challenged often default to ambiguous defenses that, if taken at face value, make them out to be properly educated on the topic at hand. At this point, it’s a thought-terminating cliché: Whether the commenter is genuinely attempting to engage in conversation or just trying to get someone off their back, “I’ve done my research” (or any of its variations) doesn’t provide room for meaningful discourse. Instead, it places the critic and the person playing defense on artificially equal footing, even if the former has far more reliable sources than the latter. If the critic attempts to dig into where the other person got their “research” (and god help them if they do), the conversation is no longer about its original topic. Instead, it’s about credibility.

I’m not saying anyone who ever says anything online should be prepared to cite every single one of their sources and be able to explain why those sources are legitimate. If this were the case, discourse would begin from an even more defensive angle than it does already. At the same time, though, it’s dangerous to pretend that everyone’s input is equally valuable because everyone’s sources must, by default, be equally authentic.

But what makes an authentic or dependable source? Does formal education inherently trump lived experience every time? Of course not. This assumption would be dangerous, too: Think of all the medical discrimination patients have experienced without proper documentation, the police brutality that goes uninvestigated, or the Indigenous botanical wisdom passed down orally for generations before the advent of Western science. Powerful people or demographics can and do prevent certain phenomena from being formalized in an effort to maintain their power. For this reason (and others), formality and legitimacy may often correlate, but they’re far from mutually exclusive. Lived experience has value, too.

For this reason, it’s important that everyone has the opportunity to share their opinions and experiences freely. The problem is that too many people present their opinions with a flourish of finality, probably to drive engagement and maybe also to feed their own egos. I can’t exactly blame them for craving clicks or confidence, but I can condemn the irresponsible way in which they chase both.

“It’s unsurprising that people are disinterested in being told how to improve or optimize themselves when many of them are only trying to survive,” Mikala Jamison writes in her recent Substack post, You’d be a better person if you exercised more. (Ironically, this title also conveys a bare-faced generalization that quite literally cannot always be true, which is a bummer. A lot of people actually manage to suck more by working out more.)

Maybe this, too, is why the proliferation of posts like these rubs me the wrong way. The internet can be a fantastic place to seek community and learn new things, but being bombarded with accusations about how you’re probably screwing up left and right doesn’t exactly make it a welcoming space in which people feel that their own unique experiences have value.

So, if this bugs you, too: What can we do? We can keep in mind that a vast majority of the posts found on social media, YouTube, forums, and blogs/newsletters are extremely subjective and designed to be taken at face value. (It’s a whole lot easier to look convincing online than it is to make a bold claim in person, where you have to face people’s dubious expressions and real-time follow-up questions.) We can actively look for reputable sources or signs of lived experience, especially when a post makes massive generalizations, claims to predict the future, or has an air of finality. And we can keep an eye on our own online behavior, including our social media comments and blog post titles, to ensure that we aren’t presenting ourselves as experts (or the end-all, be-all voice on a particular subject) when that isn’t what we are. Confidence is one thing; arrogance is another.

When I told my friend I was writing this post, she joked, “I’m not an expert, I just play one on the internet.” What a perfectly concise way to summarize my beef. Saylor, if you ever read this: You can write the next one.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ Hilary Leichter’s novel Temporary3, which hilariously (but also heartbreakingly?!) documents the life of a woman who takes increasingly ridiculous temp jobs in search of “the steadiness.” She has a zillion boyfriends, whom she calls “my culinary boyfriend,” “my tall boyfriend,” “my real estate boyfriend,” and so on. Truly an original concept.

✰ Jenny Slate’s second book of dreamlike essays, Lifeform. I love Jenny Slate and adored Little Weirds, and while her first book is definitely my favorite of the two, the writing in this one was so gorgeous, and her sense of gratitude and whimsy has infected my subconscience.

✰ This cool idea from :

This weekend I’ll be lucky enough to celebrate my 30th birthday in my favorite place with many of my favorite people. But despite preparing to enter a whole new decade, I realized Sunday evening that I haven’t done a lot of reflecting on how far I’ve gotten (it can be difficult to acknowledge your own wins sometimes) and where I wish to go next.

When I asked myself how I could go about such reflection, the first thing I thought of was taking a bookish trip down memory lane. When I was small, I was incredibly fortunate to have parents who read to me every single night, friends who enthusiastically read the little “books” I crafted out of printer paper and colored pencils at recess, and teachers who looked the other way when I’d read under my desk. Without this foundation, I don’t think I would have developed the lasting love for stories that I enjoyed throughout my teenage years (when I read a lot of Stephen King and corny romance novels), early 20s (99% feminist and antiracist literature), and now (literary fiction, cultural criticism, and soft sci-fi).

Care to indulge me as I reminisce? Maybe you’ll find a new favorite read. • ᴗ <

The following are listed in loose chronological order, not by age. If you buy any of the below via these links, I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and you’ll support indie bookstores in the process! I also recommend searching the titles on Libby to see if your library offers the e-book version for free.

Also, this email is likely too long to appear in full in your inbox. Just click on the post’s title to open it in your browser.

1. The Little House series

These are the first books I can remember my parents reading to me at bedtime, though I’m sure plenty of picture books preceded them. I was enamored with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life and often imagined bits of it as I went about my own, pouring pancake syrup into a Tupperware full of crushed ice in an effort to imitate her snowtop molasses candy (it didn’t work) and snuggling into a warm quilt during winter (which, in the Phoenix suburbs, certainly did not match Laura’s unheated log cabin experience). Looking back, I wonder if these books kickstarted my interest in mid- to late-1800s fiction and The Oregon Trail.

2. A Series of Unfortunate Events

I think every American kid (and beyond) read this series. The Boudelaire siblings’ bummer lives were just so comically fascinating, and I probably had a crush on Klaus, though it was Violet’s “tying her hair with a ribbon when she wanted to concentrate” quirk that I tried to recreate with ribbons I found around the house. (This, too, did not work. User error, I think.)

3. The Warriors series

My elementary school friends and I used to roleplay as Warriors cats at recess. Enough said.

4. Pet Sematary

Okay, so this is kind of a morbid transition from the last one, but this was the first Stephen King novel I read, and it triggered an obsession that lasted through middle school. I remember my grandma helping me find used copies at dusty bookstores in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and my mom being like, “Should she be reading those?”

5. Twilight

We’re not gonna talk about this one.

6. The Catcher in the Rye

This book is pretty controversial; I’ve even heard it said that it’s a red flag if this is someone’s favorite book, to which I say, ???. As a teen, I found Holden Caulfield’s melancholic, pessimistic, and selfish attitude kind of relatable. It’s important to see yourself reflected in a story, even if that version of you sorta sucks.

7. The Great Gatsby

Another controversial classic, though more because people disagree on how good it actually is. Personally, I don’t care much about that, because I had a blast reading this one in one of the best English classes I ever took and because it led to my friend group fashioning a Gatsby-themed pre-prom dinner/photoshoot in the park. There are just so many fun memories associated with this story.

8. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

No one I’ve mentioned this book to has known about it, so allow me to introduce you to Rose Edelstein, the young protagonist who discovers that she can sense the emotions tied into everyday objects, including her mother’s homemade lemon cake. This turns out to be a bit unfortunate as her family navigates tragedy and heartbreak, but the story itself is really beautiful, and it’s stuck with me for nearly two decades.

9. Fangirl

I’m definitely not a romance girlie these days, but I was in high school, probably because my boyfriend at the time totally sucked. Fangirl was just such an adorably wholesome story, and I think it taught me that your crush/partner should, y’know, be nice to you.

10. Gone Girl

Read at the beginning of college, Gillian Flynn’s most popular novel was the start of my interest in stories featuring female protagonists who have been pushed to a point of no return—and also my undying love affair with reading by the pool. Bonus: I saw the movie adaptation on my first-ever date with a girl, which is a cute memory.

11. Men Explain Things to Me

So begins my venture into feminist lit (and the writings of Rebecca Solnit, whose solemnly inspiring A Paradise Built in Hell I’d read years later). Sometimes, when you sense that something is wrong with the world, you turn to books to figure out why.

12. Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture & What We Can Do About It

(TW: Sexual harassment/trafficking) In the process of seeking out a part-time job during my freshman year in college, I came across a piece of evidence that resulted in the takedown of a sex trafficking ring just blocks away from campus. Though I wasn’t harmed, it was through this bizarre experience that I realized some uncomfortable things I’d experienced in high school had been forms of sexual abuse. Books like Asking for It and Sex Object: A Memoir were integral to the process of accepting that it wasn’t my fault and learning to take red flags for what they were.

13. Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment

(TW: Sexual harassment…again) I happened to receive this in a “book blind box” from my favorite indie bookstore shortly after choosing to participate in a sexual harassment lawsuit against my former employer. In a bittersweet way, Reckoning again helped me understand why behavior like my former manager’s was “allowed” to occur, and the hoops women have to jump through in an effort to see justice.

14. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Finally I began to incorporate literature about intersectional feminism and racial inequity into my personal library. Though I read The New Jim Crow around the same time that I cracked open Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Against White Feminism, and White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue, and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, this book was transformative when it came to abandoning my budding career in law enforcement. I continue to recommend it to anyone who’s just beginning to learn about the realities of the American criminal punishment system.

15. Desert Oracle: Volume 1

I’ve always loved the Sonoran Desert, but I was just beginning to fall for the Mojave when I got Desert Oracle for Christmas. I read it sitting by my dad’s fireplace, laughing about the Yucca Man and worrying over the still-unsolved disappearance of a hiker boy. Desert communities are filled with so much mystery, and I’m grateful to Ken Layne for documenting it. (I’m also eagerly waiting on a Volume 2…)

16. Fear of Missing Out: Practical Decision-Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice

When I started dating my current partner 7 years ago (!!!), I slowly and painfully learned that my longstanding “commitment issues” were actually a sign of relationship OCD, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder I’d never heard of before then. Though it almost definitely wasn’t written for this purpose, Fear of Missing Out was game-changing when it came to accepting uncertainty, which is one of the primary tenets of OCD treatment.

17. The Midnight Library

This novel was also strangely profound when it came to accepting uncertainty and trusting in my ability to create a happy future for myself.

18. Inciting Joy

In addition to being a delight to read, Inciting Joy taught me to recognize moments of beauty, camaraderie, and gratitude in everyday life. In my opinion, this book is essential for anyone interested in mindfulness and generally developing a more positive mindset, even as the world falls apart around us.

19. The Mutual UFO Network

I’m bummed that not a lot of people know about this book, and not just because the idea for my own novella probably wouldn’t have popped into my head if I hadn’t read it. I love that its characters tend to move at night, sometimes in nefarious ways, others in ways secretly heartwarming. Definitely a good read if you’re craving something bizarre, but still grounded.

20. Topics of Conversation

This was my introduction to literary fiction. At the time, I didn’t know that was the name for books that largely focus on interiority and language, but I was hooked. It was also refreshing to see a protagonist who, despite having already become a mother, didn’t want to be one. Bonus points for having read it in the pool at my old apartment.

21. Once There Were Wolves

Shortly after I read Topics of Conversation, Charlotte McConaghy’s gorgeous work showed me how mystery, environmental conflict, and darker themes can blend beautifully into lit-fic. I aspire to be like her someday.

22. Whiskey When We’re Dry

Modern westerns are so complicated. A good author will acknowledge the racial and gender injustices of the time while still spinning a story strongly rooted in place and inclusive of the more intriguing “Wild West” customs that make the story, y’know, western. Whiskey When We’re Dry does an excellent job with that, and it led to me discovering other wonderful modern westerns, like Upright Women Wanted and Outlawed.

23. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

I read Wintering during a literal winter, which was not really Katherine May’s point, but the its principles have stuck with me regardless. I pull this book out of my mental pocket whenever I’m going through a rough time and need to slow down.

24. The Employees

Definitely one of my favorite novellas of all time. This book is just so weird in the best way possible. I read it next to my partner at a fancy new cocktail spot downtown as he read his own book, and we felt cooler than all the other couples on their normie dates where they talked to each other and held hands and such.

25. To Be Taught, If Fortunate

My other favorite novella of all time. I love how raw and human this story felt, despite taking place in a far-flung interplanetary future. I def cried at the end.

26. The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

This is such a charming piece of narrative nonfiction, and it was integral to my transformation from an “indoorsy” girl to a gently outdoorsy one. I love the serenity and empowerment that come with simply noticing the natural elements around me, and I wouldn’t have started to do that if not for author Margaret Renkl.

27. Sourdough

I think I’ve mentioned this novel a thousand times on Creativity Under Capitalism, but who cares when the story is so hilariously clever and delicious?

28. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

GAHHHH. If I could only recommend one book for the end of time, it might be this one. Not only is the premise super cool—it’s a book full of “reviews” about random aspects of life, from Dr. Pepper to those geese you see at nearly every park—but it’s such a heartrendingly careful consideration of 2020s humanity that it’s just about guaranteed to make you feel seen. (I felt that way, at least.) Even if you’re not a huge fan of John Green’s YA novels, you should give this book a try. The audiobook is great, too, and it’s narrated by Green himself!

29. Small Boat

I really, really like stories that examine how humans respond to crisis, especially if they’re somehow responsible for the outcome. Small Boat is a close look at exactly that, magnifying the intrapersonal consequences that come with making the objectively wrong choice. This novel has inspired a few story ideas in me.

30. Rejection

I crack up whenever I remember reading this last Christmas and enthusiastically recommending it to my mom after only having read one story…just to realize a few stories in that it’s totally disgusting in a very sexual, very online way. (I was like, “Uhh, you maybe shouldn’t read this after all.” Hopefully she listened.) On a more serious note, these stories were not only entertaining, but effective as an exactingly observant snapshot of today’s social justice missteps, incel epidemic, and chronically online behavior.

Whew, we made it! Thanks for reflecting with me. Have you read any of these books? What are the stories that stand out to you when you look back on your life?

Leave a comment

TW: depression

Also, thank you to for encouraging me to publish this post, with and without meaning to. Your work is so unabashedly honest, and I’m not sure I would have gotten over the “cringe” of sharing this with others if I hadn’t read it, even though that’s kind of the point of this whole piece.

A week ago, at one of our coffee shop coworking sessions, a friend asked me and another friend if we were going to the No Kings March that Saturday.

“I’m kind of jaded,” I said, the no guiltily implied. “It’s hard for me to see the point these days.”

These days was an accidental double entendre, referring sort of to our current sociopolitical climate but mostly to how I’ve been lately. In February I spent my first-ever 72-hour stint at a psychiatric hospital, a fact I am not particularly shy about, less because I’m eager to challenge mental health stigma than because pretending I’m fine is a lot more painful than allowing people to judge me. (So far, though, I don’t believe they have.)

In the week or so immediately following my hospital stay, with a $2,600 facility bill freshly loaded onto my credit card (fuck the American health insurance system for making my monthly premium basically useless, but at least I’m earning travel points, I guess), I found it extremely difficult to face nearly anyone I knew. Feigning happiness or general stability felt frustrating and stupid and also kind of heartbreaking, especially because many of my closest pals were celebrating major life events at the same time that I was exploring a new low. I felt torn between what felt like two very distinct options: act as though the hospital visit was a weird and quirky fluke and everything was on the up-and-up, or allow myself to be honest about the fact that progress—in emotional well-being, in familial relationships, in allowing oneself to call something “trauma” when it could have been so much worse—was apparently not linear.

As someone who’s generally embarrassed to have needs, I am more familiar with the first option. But when life hands you a wake-up call in the form of a $2,600 EOB, you listen.

In December, when the wound that has been afflicting me was newly reopened, I began working on a novel. In a way that contrasts sharply with my debut (read: only) book, it was literary and melancholy and set in a real place, where I have memories and photographs and routines. I made Pinterest boards for the thing, told my writer friends I was working on something new. It was only once I started to sketch out an outline that I realized the story too closely mirrored my own. This wasn’t just a self-insert; it was one step away from a memoir.

Sometimes, I think my writing inadvertently attempts to take something ugly and tie it up with a pretty little bow. I was sad, but I’m happy now. I was conflicted, but I’m decided now. I was insecure, but I’m confident now. It is difficult for me to exist transparently in a difficult or unflattering state because I hate pity; I want people to know that I not only can make it through this (whatever “this” happens to be at a given time) but already have.

But I can’t do that right now. I can’t take a situation with a parent that continues to break my heart and turn it into a story that isn’t devastating. My options, then, are to put this idea on hold or write a depressing novel that never really succeeds at wringing out its grief.

Though the project still interests me for reasons that aren’t entirely autobiographical (I am a setting-first writer and setting a project in 2008 excites me, mostly because I can sneak in references to my favorite recession pop hits), I’ve set it aside. There is value in creating fiction from things you personally have experienced, but that feels too ambitious right now. Everything does. Pitching stories, promoting my book, giving my office the deep clean it’s needed for who knows how long. What little energy I have must be carefully spent, and attempting to achieve anything at all will stretch the budget.

Lately I’ve been playing the 2021 remake of The Oregon Trail1 on the Nintendo Switch. The party from my most recent playthrough included a farm girl named JILL, who was both KIND and PUGNACIOUS. She was handy when we encountered other families on the trail or when it came time to hunt, but she was prone to low morale. Her party was always having to pull out a harmonica or stop at a campfire to tell stories, lest she grow too bummed (FORLORN) and jump ship (er, wagon).

“Ugh,” I griped to my boyfriend when we were gaming separately-but-together over the weekend, “this bitch is always FORLORN.”

Don’t worry—this is not me making a cute little analogy about how like Jill, we all get a bit sad sometimes when I really mean we all have a terrifying mental breakdown sometimes, after which we need weeks, maybe months (who knows!), to recover. What I will say, though, is that after a lifetime of playing The Sims, I thought it was genius of The Oregon Trail to make every gameplay choice both advantageous and costly, in one way or another. You can stop at a campfire to tell stories all night to boost your party’s morale, but you’ll lose hours of valuable travel time. You can tightly ration your food to make it last longer, but it’ll lower morale. You can hunt, but it’ll exhaust even your best marksman.

I felt kind of stupid for thinking this was a clever game development strategy when I realized that’s how real life works, too. And, like, of course it is. I can get stronger by adding an extra workout to my weekly regimen, but that’ll make me tired, making the next workout more difficult. I can save money by eating leftovers at home, but sharing some takeout with my boyfriend would be more fun. And I could tell those around me that I’m feeling fine now while pushing myself to write or pitch or promote, but it might take longer for me to feel better if I do.

In an effort to avoid feeling even more FORLORN, I’ve been trying to strike a balance between participating in fun, non-achievement-based activities for the sake of levity and indulging my sadness when it needs to be felt. In addition to playing The Oregon Trail, I’ve been logging many an hour on Planet Zoo2, working on my garden, hanging out with my friends’ cute little baby, and attempting to improve my cake decorating skills. But I’ve also been doing a lot of crying—like, a lot—and trying to convince myself that when I talk to people about my feelings, they probably (hopefully?) won’t think, Ugh, this bitch is always sad. I’m not trying to be melodramatic, after all. I’m just being truthful, and if there’s anything I’ve learned over the past couple of months, it’s how dangerous it can be to keep the truth to myself.

I hope that when the time comes for me to weave true grief and sadness and anger into my fiction, my sincerity—my lived experience—will shine through. But I’m not quite there yet; it takes time to build up the hope and the confidence necessary to make that type of work successful. Sometimes the feelings just need to be felt before they can be made into something new.

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This is the second entry in the as-yet unnamed blog section of Creativity Under Capitalism, where I publish occasional personal and/or lifestyle-oriented posts. If that’s your thing, I’m happy to have you! If it’s not, you can unsubscribe from this section without losing your subscription to Creativity Under Capitalism.

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Every writer’s favorite pastime is looking for the “perfect” place to put their work, whether it’s a gorgeous journal they just had to grab at their favorite bookstore or a piece of software that promises to help them unlock their magnum opus. I am no different. Looking for an analog or digital writing platform feels productive because it’s technically in service of my craft, even if I’m really just burning the time and energy I could be spending on, you know, actually writing.

My never-ending search for the ideal writing platform has introduced me to a lot of different options, and while I’d love to be the type of person who sticks with just one—imagine how organized I’d be!—I like to use different platforms for different purposes. Through some discussions with writer friends, I’ve found that not only is this approach a tad unusual, but I’m using some less-than-mainstream platforms that could be of use to other people.

So, without further ado, here are my 7 favorite spots to lay down some words, plus their pros, cons, and ideal uses.1

1. Notion

I know this one sounds kind of unhinged, but hear me out. You can do just about anything in Notion, and that includes writing things of all shapes and sizes. If you’re planning a novel, you can use the “gallery” view to jot down scene descriptions, attach the pages with the content from those scenes, and rearrange their order at will. If you’re writing a story or an essay, you can do so in a distraction-free editor with all the mainstream formatting options (bold, italics, etc), nothing more.

Word count and version history are built in (under the top-right meatball menu), pages are super easy to organize, and the export feature is both beautiful and convenient (though there’s no .doc/.docx file type, which sucks for submitting to certain literary magazines). I love that Notion is easy to create and edit across all of my devices, making it easy to add to my projects on the go, and I don’t have to worry about manually saving or syncing anything. You can even collaborate on pages with other users, though I haven’t tried this yet myself.

Pros: Accessible anywhere. Clean, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing interface. Highly versatile. Auto-saves your work. Easy to create PDFs from Notion pages. New feature lets you mark pages as “available offline” for writing/editing sans internet. You can browse other users’ templates for things like writing streaks, outlining, and more.

Cons: As with any cloud-based system, you’ll want to back up your work regularly, and what’s stored on Notion isn’t end-to-end encrypted. I also haven’t figured out how to indent the first line of a paragraph, which could be inconvenient if you’re writing long-form fiction, though you can easily add those later.

Ideal uses: I really can’t think of any type of writing that wouldn’t work with Notion, which is why it ranks so highly for me. I even use it to track project progress, organize writing sprints, and brainstorm ideas, and it’s nice to have those things and much of my work in the same place.

2. Scrivener

I have a love-hate relationship with Scrivener. I want to get to know it better, but its bajillion features/options/toggles elude me, so I resent it a bit for its complexity. Nevertheless, it is an excellent tool for novel brainstorming and writing, so I’ve used it for a few long-form projects. I love the scene feature, which allows you to make little cards and move them around as if on a desk or a corkboard. I also love that it’s a piece of local software, so you don’t need internet access to use it, which is great for when you really want to lock in. That makes it feel kind of old-school to me, and I’d be lying if I said using Scrivener didn’t make me feel like a Real, Serious Writer™ (when I’m not feeling hassled by a confusing feature, at least).

Pros: “Buy it for life,” AKA no subscriptions! Doesn’t require an internet connection. Easy to save your work where you want it (and back it up somewhere else). Versatile with LOTS of customization options. Great for plotting and nesting pages within other pages.

Cons: Expensive. Very steep learning curve—I feel that I’m still only using like 10% of Scrivener because going any deeper scares me. Utilitarian/not particularly pretty.

Ideal uses: Drafting and editing long-form projects like novels/novellas, nonfiction books, scripts, screenplays, and story collections.2

I’m a Scrivener affiliate, so while I wasn’t paid to include the software in this post, I will earn a small commission if you buy a license via my link! Just another way to support the newsletter ☺︎

Click here to learn more about Scrivener

3. AlphaSmart (or another writing deck)

AlphaSmarts hold a special place in my heart. They’re what I learned to write on in elementary school, and because we were little geeks, my friends and I made our parents order used ones on eBay for us to draft stories on at home. At sleepovers, we’d bashfully share those stories (some featuring our crushes, lol) with each other by passing our AlphaSmarts back and forth.

Today, there are all sorts of AlphaSmart copycats, including the Freewrite Alpha and the new open-source and DIY-friendly ZeroWriter Ink. Some of these modern writer decks (as the subreddit r/writerdeck calls them) have the benefit of saving your work to the cloud, while others keep everything on-device. I’ll admit that while I love my AlphaSmart Neo 2, local-only storage is the reason I don’t use it as much as I’d like; I fear the device malfunctioning and deleting all my work, which is probably more likely with a 30+ year old piece of hardware. Still, I dig taking it to a coffee shop or my backyard for a bit of low-stakes, playful writing, which I’m trying to do more these days.

Pros: Fun to use. Prevents you from editing as you write by only showing you the last 2-5 lines. Impossible to get distracted on the internet. Great conversation starter in public spaces—I get a lot of “WTF is that???” questions, which can be fun or irritating, depending on the vibe that day.

Cons: Extremely limited formatting options. Writer decks with exclusively local storage should be backed up frequently, in case it gets lost, damaged, or stolen.

Ideal uses: Drafting, 100% (do not attempt to edit something on a writer deck unless you have marbles to spare). Also great for traveling, especially if you’re going on a writing retreat, where you want as few distractions as possible.

4. A regular old notebook

“Analog” is the word of the year, and there isn’t a writing tool that better fits the bill than a notebook. Some people fear writing by hand, but it’s my favorite way to brainstorm; stream-of-consciousness writing becomes much easier when the pen forces me to slow down my actual output. Notebooks are also cheap, highly portable, and inoffensive in public settings, and they don’t need to be charged. IMO, every writer should carry one everywhere.

Pros: Unlimited size/paper/rule/aesthetic options. Easy to take with you wherever you go. Prevents you from having to look at yet another screen. Won’t let you get distracted on the internet. People think you’re very cool/serious when you write in one in public.

Cons: No real way to “back up” your work, unless you want to transcribe everything on a computer. Not super private (unless you trust everyone you’re around or have a 90s-style password journal). Easy for your hand to tire.

Ideal uses: Brainstorming, plotting, working through gaps/questions, jotting down ideas on the go.

5. Novlr

Novlr is a free, web-based Scrivener alternative. While it lacks many of the complicated bells and whistles found in Scrivener, it replicates others in a way that I find much cleaner and easier to understand. You can write directly within Novlr, using the sidebar to quickly navigate between chapters/scenes. Free users can create up to 5 projects and view those projects by their types, word counts, last modified date, and custom tags. You can also set daily and monthly word count goals and track your streaks within Novlr, which is fun. (Paid users get access to unlimited projects, additional analytical features, and the ability to create a simple author website.)

I like how easy Novlr is to use; there’s far less of a learning curve than with Scrivener. One of my friends uses Novlr to write long-form, multi-chapter fanfic, and I used it to write the beginnings of Those Lights at Night before finally biting the bullet and purchasing a Scrivener license. (I wanted to write offline, and that’s sort of a deal-breaker with a web app like Novlr.)

Pros: Free, and Novlr isn’t annoying about asking you to upgrade. Clean, aesthetically pleasing, and user-friendly interface. A great way to test the Scrivener waters—if you like Novlr’s bare-bones outline features but wish you had a little more, you’ll probably enjoy Scrivener.

Cons: Only works with an internet connection, so it may not be a great fit for writers on the go. Easy to get distracted since you’re working within your web browser. Regular local backups are suggested in case something goes wrong with Novlr’s cloud service. (Luckily, Novlr makes exports super easy.)

Ideal uses: Drafting long-form projects like books or theses, as long as you have reliable internet access.

6. Pages

Pages is Apple’s free MacOS alternative to Microsoft Word. It has fewer features than Word, but all the regular stuff is there. This is my preferred option when I want to create something short and/or temporary—a letter of recommendation, a .doc/.docx export of a story, a poem—offline, because creating a new Scrivener file feels like A Big Deal. I used Pages a lot when I was creating different versions of Those Lights at Night to send to agents and publishers, since they want samples in varying lengths and file types.

Pros: Free. Easy to use. Functions offline. No BS customization options that will steal your attention away from actually writing. Lots of export file types. Also lots of templates for things like ebooks and cover letters (which are important for submitting to residencies, fellowships, and so on).

Cons: Not available on Windows PCs. Some of the more graphic templates are kind of tacky, so I stick to the text-only ones. You can only collaborate with other Apple users who have iCloud accounts.

Ideal uses: Drafting and/or exporting short or long-form pieces that don’t need a lot of complicated formatting; creating an ebook for self-publishing.

7. Google Docs

Ugh. Google Docs is ridiculously convenient, but man, does it have its shortcomings. Organizing in Google Drive sucks—you can make folders, but within those folders, good luck—and Google maintains access to anything you store there, which isn’t great for privacy. This didn’t bother me too much before Google got into the generative AI game, but these days, I feel a little iffy about writing anything meaningful or sensitive there. I pretty much just use it for quick notes and strictly professional materials (resumes, cover letters, etc) now.

That said, it’s hard to drop Google Docs completely when it’s a free and easier-to-use copy of Microsoft Word, the word processor many of us grew up with. A lot of people use it, too, so collaborating there is often easier than doing so on Notion or someplace else; you don’t have to teach someone how to use it before you can start the real work.

Pros: Free. Intuitive. Easy to collaborate. Has most mainstream formatting and customization features. Accessible on any type of device. Wide range of export file types.

Cons: Dubious security. Lackluster organization options. Owned by Google.

Ideal uses: Co-authoring or getting beta readers’ feedback on a piece; creating or editing short, temporary projects that you may need to access from different devices, such as resumes or cover letters for gigs and fellowships.

Whew! This was a lengthy one, but I hope you found it helpful. Do you enjoy using a writing platform I didn’t mention? Will you give any of these a try? Let me know!

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In January I attended my first book club. The host, a friend who is from the generation before mine, piled his kitchen counter with foods from the book we’d read: carne asada fries, General Tso’s chicken, cupcakes, and homemade Rice Krispies bars studded with Lucky Charms.1 Throughout the night he went around the table, offering the dozen-or-so attendees more wine and topping off their water glasses. He even placed a little book flag in his front yard so his house would be easy to find.

I’m certain this was an unusually decadent book club experience (it even featured an appearance from the author, prompting me to joke with my friend that I’ll never attend another book club for fear of disappointment), but after I tucked into my car to head home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how cherished I’d felt throughout the night. It’s possible that my friend is simply an incredible host. More than that, though, I was struck by the feeling that this was a gathering he wanted to put on, not something he was beholden to, like some sort of social chore.

This is not the vibe I tend to get from organized gatherings.

Gatherings-with-a-purpose—group writing sessions, craft nights, wine tastings, board game nights, group hikes, bar trivia—are my favorite kind of gathering to put together. I suspect this is partly related to my social anxiety (having a predefined “reason” to hang out is more approachable to me than a gathering without a plan because I know what to expect), in addition to the fact that I love bringing a bunch of my favorite people under one roof.

For this reason, I can’t help but notice that people increasingly treat gatherings-with-a-purpose as a burden—or, worse, an opportunity to be exploited—when they’re the ones putting them on. An online writing group I attended a few times started charging members for the privilege of joining the organizer on a 1-hour Zoom call (half of which was spent creating asynchronously with the cameras and microphones turned off). A popular book club in my city requires that members pay monthly dues. Artists on Instagram whose work I otherwise admire are charging people to participate in their “pen pal clubs.” A virtual family estrangement support group I found last week won’t let you join their Facebook page until you pay a $30 initiation fee.2 And don’t get me started on so-called “writing retreats” that total far more per person than their accommodations and amenities realistically cost.

Sometimes I see people defend this hyper-transactional charging-to-hang-out model, saying “everyone needs to make a living!!!” or “I’m providing a service” any time someone eyes them suspiciously. But these excuses are so flawed that they’re borderline laughable. No one is making a living by charging a minivan’s worth of adults $5 per month to write on Zoom or swap letters (in this cost of living crisis especially), and the fundamental difference between charging for a service and charging to simply gather is instruction (or a lack thereof). If the organizer of a writing session or craft night3 or support group could be relied upon to offer insight from their own professional or lived experience each time, those gatherings would be called workshops or group therapy, but they are not. (In fact, many of them, support groups especially, have disclaimers assuring attendees that they will not receive professional or personalized advice.)

I’m lucky to have friends who see the intrinsic value in spending time with one another and/or seem happy to go along with my never-ending supply of “no cover” gatherings-with-a-purpose. Nevertheless, I’m bitter about the mounting assumption that it is appropriate to charge people to be community with each other. Whether they’re on Zoom, at a library, or in a church basement, book clubs, writing groups, support groups, and other organized gatherings are time-honored ways to spend one’s time, get to know other people, and build knowledge outside of work or the home. When we charge people to participate in what are ostensibly non-hierarchical gatherings like these, we make the barrier to entry higher while making lasting participation harder to maintain. We also convey a hurtful message: I would not be in community with you if you were not giving me money. In my opinion, this message adds friction to the process of building meaningful relationships with each other. Is that fracturing worth $5?

It’s frustrating that “the loneliness epidemic” can be a buzzword at the same time that people are charging others to do art in the same room or send postcards back and forth. I am a freelancer and an entrepreneur at heart (despite my distaste for the word, given its capitalist weight) and have always been fond of finding creative ways to make money. Never in my life, though, have I thought to charge people for the privilege of spending time with me. That is a particularly nasty type of capitalist conceit.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ This East of Eden quote. (BTW, have you read East of Eden? Was it worth the 600 pages?)

✰ My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman. This is such a fascinating book in both form and subject matter. The narrator is the author herself being interviewed about the creation of her next novel, which she’s writing in real time. I really busted out my annotation stationery for this one! (Also, I bought it at a queer bookstore in Seattle with —a sweet memory I come back to whenever I open the book 🥹)

✰ Scratchboard art. My partner and I learned about it at the International Exhibit of Nature in Art at the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum on Sunday, and we were both amazed at how much texture the material can introduce to what’s still a 2D form. This little fella by Priscilla Baldwin (who I just learned is co-founder of the museum’s Art Institute?!) was my favorite!

Ratings and reviews are a frequent topic of conversation in my household. My partner (a triple Virgo, I tell people by way of explanation, even though I don’t really believe in all that) is obsessed with tracking every video game he plays, every movie he watches, and every book he reads, often by way of popular apps like Letterboxd and StoryGraph (but also through his own bespoke spreadsheets, because he is a nerd). Even if he’s not dishing out stars or long-winded summaries passed off as analyses—why do people do this?!—it’s inevitable that he’ll come across other people’s ratings or reviews as we step out of a movie theater or into a bookstore, and then we’ll talk about it, even though we almost always conclude that random strangers’ opinions about art should be taken with a grain of salt.

I’ve always been fairly ambivalent about reviews. I fancy myself a relatively independent thinker who can decide for herself what she enjoys, thank you very much, and unless a restaurant or book has something like 1 star out of 412 ratings (perhaps indicating that the restaurant has roaches or the author was blatantly racist), most scores fall somewhere in the middle, making everything look more or less the same. Still, I never really understood the tirades against the 5-star rating system. Sure, how we experience art is subjective, but how else are we supposed to share our opinions about quality?

I expected my feelings to change after publishing my first book; after all, it’s easy to feel indifferent about ratings when they have nothing to do with you or what you’ve made. Even now, though—stars having been gifted in my favor and wielded against it—I have less of a distaste for the 5-star system than a fascination in it. Because if there’s anything I’ve learned since my debut, it’s that people’s rating and review frameworks vary wildly from one individual to the next, rendering the whole thing pretty damn useless.

Yet we march on, tossing stars at everything from electric toothbrushes to other people’s magnum opuses.

I began this essay in early January. In the weeks since, I’ve gone from feeling relatively confident that I could defend the 5-star rating system from its haters to surprised that we insist on continuing to use it. At this point, I hope I can provide a little food for thought on how rating and review culture impacts how we engage with the world.

At the start of this year, I made a deal with myself: I will not check my own book’s ratings and reviews for six months.

“It’s tempting to be hawkishly online during the publication of your debut in order to gain some semblance of insight into the opaque, rarefied process that is mainstream publishing,” novelist Sharlene Teo writes in her essay “On Reception and Resilience” in Letters to a Writer of Color1 (my favorite craft manual of all time). “I didn’t have the willpower to avoid my own reviews; hunting for an ego stroke, instead stumbling across some thorny critique or snarky comment that lingered in my consciousness for days afterward because it confirmed some insecurity I harbored about my own writing.”

When I read Teo’s essay a month after my authorial debut, so much resonated that I found myself highlighting what must have been half of the text. Even more delicious was the fact that this was something I wasn’t “supposed” to talk to people about (especially following the recent Elyse Myers drama) and therefore didn’t, instead chewing on my own aches and anxieties in private.

Because if promoting your own work is embarrassing, seeing it scored on a highly subjective scale is downright mortifying.

Tao continues:

“Surprisingly, it was not the one-star zingers that stung the most but the three-star ones, the readers who spent time with the book and at the end of it thought, ‘meh.’...I couldn’t separate readerly experience from the maelstrom of feelings and effort that went into writing that novel. Dismissals felt like not being seen.”

I share many of Tao’s feelings, though I’m not sure which is worse: not being seen, or being seen and the other person not liking what they’ve found. But even an ostensibly low star rating says little about whether someone likes or dislikes what they see, because everyone’s internal scale is so different.

My partner and I are not stingy with our stars. Why would we be? Those stars cost us nothing—we could give everything 5 stars, if we wanted, and some say we should—and if the point of the 5-star rating system is to reflect our personal experiences, we’re comfortable allowing it to fulfill that purpose. Meanwhile, throughout my years of using Goodreads and now StoryGraph, I’ve seen too many reviews to count that say something along the lines of Exactly what I was looking for! or Just what I needed, only to stick up a 3- or 4-star rating.

The prevalence of these types of reviews reminds me of videos I keep seeing about how the 5-star rating system works outside of my American norm. In Japan, for example, it’s apparently normal for people to rate what I’d consider a 5-star dining experience—great ambiance, a clean space, delicious food, friendly servers—3 or 3.5 stars. Frank Striegl, a Japan-born food blogger who runs ramen tours in Tokyo, says this is owed to Japanese culture’s emphasis on humility and indifference toward excessive praise. If someone rates a Japanese restaurant 3 stars, it generally means the dining experience went the way they wanted or expected it to go.

So, cultural differences add another layer of complexity to the ostensibly “standard” or “simple” 5-star review system. Add personal perspectives on rating, and you could potentially meet 5 different people who all dish out their 5 stars in very different ways, even if they all somehow have an identical experience with a restaurant or a work of art.

But can we have identical experiences? Probably not. One of my favorite books, John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, emphasizes how fundamentally personal star ratings are by attaching them to both concrete topics (Dr. Pepper, Super Mario Kart, air conditioning, etc) and nebulous concepts (including Googling strangers, plague, and our capacity for wonder). Every multi-page essay-turned-memoir weaves Green’s personal experiences in with the relevant topic before he declares his rating. And though this premise may sound a tad ridiculous, that’s by design; Green acknowledges that rating anything on a numerical scale is both an exercise in futility and a relatively new phenomenon.

Green cites his experience as a book reviewer at Booklist in the early 2000s, noting in his introduction that review culture has shifted dramatically over the past half-century:

“The five-star scale has only been used in critical analysis for the past few decades. While it was occasionally applied to film criticism as early as the 1950s, the five-star scale wasn’t used to rate hotels until 1979, and it wasn’t widely used to rate books until Amazon introduced user reviews. The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era.”

Maybe aggregated star ratings were useful once upon a time (I’m not old enough to argue with Green on that point), but today, if you look at any given book, movie, restaurant, hotel, or consumer product, it likely features a score somewhere between 3 and 4.5 stars—AKA “good enough.” Because almost nothing is universally liked or hated, it’s rare to see anything with an aggregated star rating so high or low that it guarantees a particular experience.

Essayist Emily Mester, whose book American Bulk features an entire essay about why she no longer rates or reviews things online, notes the same:

“Anytime I considered a new bar or restaurant, even if I was standing right in front of it, I’d dutifully open [Yelp], squinting down at my little screen to determine whether the experience was worth having…But rarely did the experience match the aggregated rating on the restaurant’s Yelp page, which somehow always seemed to be four stars. Many people gave five stars indiscriminately…People don’t care about things in the same amounts.”

But, oh, do they care. A friend once told me that she was hesitant to join Goodreads or StoryGraph because she didn’t want to evaluate books on a 5-star scale as she read; she worried it would alter her perception. Not only do I suspect such a shift has happened within myself—though it’s unflattering for me to share, I’ll sometimes find myself thinking, Hmm, this one’s a 3-star for me long before a book is over—but Mester describes her dad following into a similar mentality on Yelp:

“...restaurants became his favorite pastime…He always knew when a new spot was opening, was eager to dissect the crispness of its side potatoes, the layout of its menu, the visual interest of its light fixtures. In the middle of a lackluster meal, my mom might comment on how the tables felt too crowded together, or the AC was cranked too high, or she’d note, during a good one, how expertly the steak had been seared, how warm and attentive the server had been, and she would turn to my dad and tell him he should put that in the review. They crafted their critique as they chewed.”

If there’s anything I resent about modern review culture, it’s that it’s now a sport to craft critiques for apps and websites that aggregate star ratings. I once felt that star ratings were fairly self-serving: I, for example, rate books on StoryGraph mostly so that I can observe trends in my reading tastes and see how I felt about a given book long after I’ve read it. But anyone who attaches a written review to their rating—myself included—knows they’re being watched. It’s why I don’t dare join Letterboxd; based on my limited experience, the app is an arena in which users compete to see who can leave the snarkiest one-line review, and that’s annoying as hell.

Unfortunately for me (an author who would like to think reviews are primarily a way for people to thoughtfully share their experiences with a work or product), similar priorities can be found among the users on other platforms, which are numerous, to say the least.

Green writes:

In the years since I’d been a book reviewer, everyone had become a reviewer, and everything had become a subject for reviews. The five-star scale was applied not just to books and films but to public restrooms and wedding photographers. The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,000 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8. A scene in the movie adaptation of my book The Fault in Our Stars was filmed on a bench in Amsterdam; that bench now has hundreds of Google reviews. (My favorite, a three-star review, reads in its entirety: “It is a bench.”)

If they wanted to, a person could spend the rest of their life reading ratings and reviews on virtually everything under the sun. The existence of those ratings and reviews isn’t necessarily a bad thing; we all have the right to share our thoughts and experiences. (This is the relatively weak argument I’d always come back to when I heard someone griping about the 5-star system.) But it’s difficult to trust that those data points mean anything at all when the scale is so subjective and reviews are often written for comedic purposes. And don’t even get me started on incentivized ratings and reviews, which are really just ads.

Maybe that isn’t the worst thing in the world, though. If star ratings and other quantitative measurements of quality were truly objective, there would be yet another avenue through which people could game the system by producing art (and restaurants and so on) in repetitive and frankly boring ways, all for the purpose of fulfilling some unshifting list of criteria. And who would get to decide what goes on that list, anyway?

I’m both comforted and left a little bit wanting by Tao’s conclusion to her essay, which reads:

“I don’t think I will ever write a book that everyone loves. And I’ve made peace with the fact that I can’t please everyone and that the story-shaped impulses and ideas I harbor will never live up to their reality.”

It is true that none of us will ever make anything that is universally loved. But I wish that, faced with a genuinely endless quantity of spaces in which to share our opinions, the best-known channel responsible for communicating those opinions was a little bit clearer, a little more earnest. Faced with a cold and unaccommodating alternative, however, I suppose this is the best we’ve got.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ People in Chicago and Minnesota who are using their car alarms to alert their neighbors that ICE is nearby.

✰ Learning that author Charlotte McConaghy wrote speculative fiction before moving into literary fiction, thus reminding me that it’s okay for our interests to shift!

✰ The Verge’s very bold choice to feature a “Best gas masks” round-up by features editor and lawyer Sarah Jeong on its homepage.

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I have always had a terrible memory. I often joke that my best friend is my memory; now and then she’ll ask if I remember a moment from our teenage years or early 20s, to which I’ll always respond, No, but I believe you. I am grateful that she remembers so much of what we’ll one day call “our youth,” but dismayed whenever I can’t relive the bubbly laughter, bewilderment, or melodramatic high school emotion that she so easily calls to mind.

A few months ago, I shared this with my therapist, and she frowned. “A poor memory is often a marker of a terrible childhood,” she said. But I shook my head. My childhood wasn’t abrasive enough for my brain to want to scrub itself clean. The problem, I posited, was that I never paid sufficient attention to anything. I was always focused on whatever was going to come next.

I’m doing that now on my couch. It’s New Year’s Eve, and the living room is dimly lit, a jazz compilation playing on the TV. I’ve brewed myself a cup of hazelnut black tea in anticipation of our late night out, but it’s over-steeped; I forgot about it a minute after dunking the bag into the hot water, having mentally moved on to the next task (whatever that was). Everything I do is simply a way of biding my time until the next thing, which will serve as a waiting room activity for what follows.

Is this a survival strategy? Maybe. In high school, when my relationship with one parent really began to deteriorate, I convinced myself that I just needed to make it to graduation, after which I could move to Arizona (where I’d spent my early years) and form a life of my own choosing. Through college, as I worked a very intense full-time job and took a full slate of classes (often while also working freelance gigs on the side), I told myself that I just needed to make it to graduation, after which I could finally slow down and start living. Then, after graduation and the implosion of my planned career in federal law enforcement (lol), I told myself that I needed to hustle to build the writing career that the world had always implied was unrealistic and unsustainable. After that was settled, I could hopefully afford to stop and smell the roses.

But here I am, with most of the life I yearned for as a teenager—a loving partner, a home I own, a career I’m good at and enjoy, plenty of friends, a published book, and two cats who are my whole world—plus more, and I still insist on rushing ahead. Part of me thinks this is because I am constantly convinced I don’t have “enough time”; a few years ago, after breaking free of long-term suicidal ideation and realizing that I did indeed want to live for a while, I developed a fear that, out of a cruel sense of irony, the universe would kill me off earlier than I newly wanted. In a way, I feel that I’m on borrowed time. If I want to publish another book or buy rural property in my favorite desert town (my most frivolous but stubborn dream), I’d better do it quick.

But if I don’t break this pattern, another year will pass with little conscious memory to accompany it. While scrolling through my camera roll for photos to add to the collage above, I came across moments I’d completely forgotten about: one of the most incredible dinners of my life in upstate New York; fostering two rambunctious orange kittens; surprise fireworks while my friends and I were at the pool. If you had asked me pre-scroll what my 2025 was like, I probably would have mentioned my authorial debut or the part-time job I desperately wanted, got, and then left six months later. The “big” stuff.

Intellectually, I know that life is not just a collection of the type of events that end up on one’s Wikipedia page: it’s also what happens in between. The best days of my life so far were not the ones in which I got into my alma mater, moved to Arizona, bought my house, or earned my first publishing deal. They’re ones in which the universe served up seemingly small yet pleasant surprises, and I had the awareness required to recognize just how lucky I was to experience them.

Emotionally, though, it’s hard to convince myself to slow down. I see in the news that a young person has died in a terrible and unexpected way, and my anxious brain reminds me: That could be you next time. Better hurry up. Or I finish a book, flip it over to read the author’s bio, and realize that they are roughly my age, only to ask myself why, unlike them, I haven’t yet managed to land in the Paris Review and secure a literary agent. It’s this cycle that urges me to push fast-forward, desperate to get to “the good parts” so at least I’ll know they’re there at all.

But this is the good part, I tell myself on the couch. There’s a quiet, calming sort of magic in allowing these moments in between to illuminate how my cats play with each other, how the shrimp dance across the gravel in my little aquarium, or how impeccably my boyfriend cuts the chives that go on top of our dinner. Don’t these details lend texture to a life, too?

I’m two days into the new year when I finish writing this post. As 2025 gave way to 2026, it began to rain, with a smattering of showers appearing throughout the first day of the new year. I can’t help but assume such timely rain is a good omen here in the desert, and when I head out for a boxing session, I notice that the air smells like creosote, though the nearest mountain preserve is a few miles away. The resilient plant’s scent lingers as I run a few post-workout errands, infusing urban Phoenix with the quintessential aroma of desert rain. With every item I cross off my to do list, I challenge myself to take a deep breath and remember that moment.

Is the Walgreens parking lot a Wikipedia-worthy place? Is the post office? No. But I want to remember them anyway.

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This is the first entry in the as-yet unnamed blog section of Creativity Under Capitalism, where I’ll publish occasional personal and/or lifestyle-oriented posts. If that’s your thing, I’m happy to have you! If it’s not, you can unsubscribe from this section without losing your subscription to Creativity Under Capitalism.

My debut novella, Those Lights at Night—about a desert town that fakes alien abductions to attract tourists and the suspicious disappearances that send it into a tailspin—is now available in audio and ebook format! If you’re enjoying Creativity Under Capitalism, consider picking up a copy (perhaps as a holiday gift?) or buying me a coffee to make my day!

New Year’s resolutions are surprisingly controversial. For some of us, they offer an exciting framework through which to differentiate the years and seek self-improvement; for others, they’re a reminder of the ways in which such improvement is demanded of us, constantly and often unthinkingly, by a system that won’t let us rest or accept ourselves the way we are.

While I can understand both perspectives, I have a few critiques of this either-or view. The first is that rest is just as valid a pursuit as anything else and can therefore be a goal or resolution, as it will be for me in 2026. The second is that pursuing one form of lifestyle change or self-improvement does not have to mean throwing rest or self-acceptance out the window. The third is that, well, this doesn’t have to be anything serious if you don’t want it to be. My BFF’s New Year’s resolution one year was to use more obscure emojis, for goodness sake.

Another reason I see people begrudging New Year’s resolutions, though—as this excellent Tumblr post alludes—is because they’ve failed at them in the past, and they’re afraid of failing again.

As an enthusiastic New Year’s Resolutioner™ who has never not met a resolution she’s set for herself (as an adult, anyway), I’d like to share some tips on how you can set goals you’ll actually achieve in 2026. Try them out, and I bet that this time next year, you’ll have something to gloat to your friends about.

Be selective.

I’m convinced that the reason many people fail at their resolutions year after year is because of how easy it is to believe that next year will be The Year They Get Their Shit Together. This is a tempting belief that I, too, have to ward off with a stick shaped vaguely like a sword: With virtually no plans on the calendar yet, the new year looks like something I’ll glide right through, with no logistical or emotional disruptions to hinder my progress.

The key word, of course, is “yet.” Almost as soon as the clock strikes midnight on December 31, most of us will experience some assortment of friends wanting to arrange a group trip, kids wanting to join new extracurriculars, local organizations asking for volunteers, bosses pressuring us to do overtime, fresh freelance opportunities dominating our lunch breaks, and so on. (That’s not to mention the political stressors, interpersonal strife, medical crises, et cetera that inevitably dot everyone’s life.)

The calendar will fill up, and fast. Suddenly, 2026 won’t look like “our year” anymore.

This means it’s important to be picky about the goals we pursue. While it’s lovely to imagine that in 2026 we’ll all get smarter and hotter and healthier and richer and better at our jobs and whatever else people aim for, it’s far more realistic—and therefore achievable—to pick just one of those things.

Scratch that. We should pick a piece of one of those things.

Be specific.

The difference between an intention and a goal is specificity. Intentions are largely vibes-based, while goals are measurable or, at the very least, have a distinct “end.” (This is a good thing. It means you get to pop a champagne bottle or whatever once you reach the finish line—but more on that in a bit!)

Intentions vs. goals:

“I want to write more” → “I want to finish the first draft of my novel.”

“I want to prioritize rest” → “I’m going to reserve two nights to myself each week for restorative activities.”

“I want to save money” → “I want to have [specific dollar amount] in my savings account by the end of the year.”

Again, remember to be realistic about this. Rest is my resolution in 2026, and while right now I feel that two nights a week for myself is not enough, I know even that will be difficult to maintain. Plus, no one’s saying I can’t enjoy three whole evenings to myself if a light week comes my way, and no one’s saying you can’t write or save a little extra if you find yourself with the appropriate resources, either.

Know why you’re pursuing this particular goal.

Are you setting this resolution because you want to, or because you think achieving it will impress someone else? Making other people happy isn’t always a bad thing—see such hits as “quitting cigarettes for your kids,” “starting couples counseling,” and “going to more of your nephew’s basketball games so he knows you love him”—but in many cases, if you’re setting about a goal that you’re totally unenthusiastic about for someone else’s sake, well…

Sorting your potential resolutions into “doing it for me” and “doing it purely for someone else” categories can help you more effectively implement point #1, “be selective.” Again, don’t be a dick or anything; inconvenience is the cost of community, and so on. It’s just something you may want to consider.

Break your goal into manageable chunks.

This is a pretty standard project planning strategy, but when we set lofty New Year’s resolutions, we tend to forget it. Breaking one big goal into several, more stomachable objectives can make the new year feel far less intimidating and help you maintain your motivational momentum. Better yet, it prevents you from falling behind and feeling the pressure to “make up for lost time” toward the end of the year.

If your 2026 resolution is to write the first draft of your novel, it could help to set word count milestones along the way, like 1,500 words per week. Similarly, a savings goal could involve depositing a set amount into your account each month. If you’re trying to get your Etsy or Redbubble store off the ground, a quarterly sales goal might feel more achievable than a big annual one; if you want to learn to cook in 2026, trying a new recipe every Sunday feels more manageable than dominating a whole cookbook by the end of the year.

Celebrate your wins.

It’s so much easier to mourn what we haven’t achieved than it is to celebrate what we have. Maybe this comes from the perception that everyone around us is doing so much better than we are, or maybe we’re just not used to our accomplishments getting much attention. Either way, giving our wins the love they deserve can provide the positive reinforcement necessary to keep going when a goal feels virtually impossible to achieve.

In 2025, I wanted to make exercise a stronger habit, so I told myself I’d work out 300 days out of the year. To track this, I made a cute little chart in Canva that allowed me to fill in a bubble for each exercise day. But to help sustain my excitement, I placed a little star in each 100th bubble, indicating that once I reached it, I’d earn some sort of prize. (I also set some nice-to-have objectives, AKA “bonus goals,” that would earn me five bubbles each; this, I think, helped me feel proud of myself for achieving more specific exercise-related milestones within a far more nebulous goal.)

If you do decide to implement a reward system, I suggest offering yourself something that you’d really like, but that isn’t necessarily essential. (Don’t withhold things, add them, or this will become a punishment system, not a reward one.) Rewards don’t have to be material, either! Maybe you and your partner create a lovely at-home date night for every milestone you meet, or you go on a celebratory hike to mark the occasion. More than how it looks or what it costs, it’s important that a prize makes your brain and body feel good.

Know who your supporters are (and aren’t).

My mom recently told me that she has a friend who makes fun of her for maintaining a budget. While she said it was only light teasing, I’m not sure I’d share money-related goals with a person who’s viewed previous iterations of those goals as a joke. Similarly, if I knew people who didn’t take my creative pursuits or personal well-being seriously, I’d probably be tight-lipped about my related resolutions with them, too.

On the other hand, finding people who are supportive of your goals can make achieving them a lot easier. It’s taken me far less effort to write on a consistent basis since I found a group of writers with whom to meet weekly, and because I have parents and a partner who feel strongly about living a financially healthy lifestyle, it’s fun to talk about and celebrate monetary achievements with them. Crucially, these people are also sensitive to my feelings and experiences when I hit a rough patch in either area, which is how I know they’re genuinely supportive.

If you haven’t yet found folks with whom you can talk about your most important goals, it could be worth looking for them online. Discord communities, Reddit threads, Meetup or BFF (formerly Geneva) groups, and even subscriber chats here on Substack can introduce you to some pretty cool people. So can local non-profits, where I’ve seen some wildly specific support groups, or interest-specific gatherings like conferences and markets, if you can afford them.

I hope these tips are helpful! I’m always interested in hearing about other people’s New Year’s resolutions, so if you’d like to share yours below, please do—and I hope your 2026 gets off to a wonderful start!

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Have a second for a quick poll?

I love writing thinky, “let’s figure this thing out together”-type posts, but it seems that these kinds of posts are losing favor, while highly personal, blog-style posts are in. Part of me wonders whether this is because the former takes a little more mental work to absorb while “day in the life”/diary entries feel relatively lightweight, and most of us have enough on our minds as it is. But who knows!

My debut novella, Those Lights at Night—about a desert town that fakes alien abductions to attract tourists and the suspicious disappearances that send it into a tailspin—is now available in audio and ebook format! If you’re enjoying Creativity Under Capitalism, consider picking up a copy (perhaps as a holiday gift?) or buying me a coffee to make my day!

Note: This issue is a follow-up to “Promoting your own work is embarrassing.” If you haven’t read that one yet, check it out! (Also, my apologies for not offering a voice-over for this issue; I’ve been having tile installed in my house all week, and it is not quiet. 🫠)

Most of us know the high of beginning a new project, the slog of seeing it through, and the euphoria of finally being able to say it’s complete. But what about what comes after?

When I was in new-author limbo, having signed my publishing contract but still waiting for Those Lights at Night to actually come out, my friends would ask what I was doing to promote my book. Feeling safe in the knowledge that my publishing journey was not conventional whatsoever and literally could not follow the traditional “spend a year pre-release marketing the hell out of this thing” route, I sort of shrugged, saying I was waiting for my “assets”—pretty much just my cover art—to come through before I could sort out an aesthetically consistent social media strategy. (Whoops: Virtually none of what I’ve posted on social media since TLaN’s release has been “aesthetically consistent.”) Though this was a real concern at the time, I was also eager to put off the painful work of self-promotion, which is, as this post discusses, extremely embarrassing.

I’m only a month-ish into this whole “author” thing, and I’m sure that the sheer repetition required of book promo will eventually make me, if not numb to it all, than at least a little more comfortable. Still, I’m a firm believer in learning from other people’s experiences in addition to your own, so I’ve chatted with a few kind creatives about their self-promo ups and downs. Through them, I’ve learned that there are a few mental notes (affirmations?) that make promo easier to swallow.

What you make is a core element of your identity.

“Making the decision to promote yourself sort of comes with the decision to say: I am an artist,” singer-songwriter told me at the start of a video call about the shame associated with self-promotion.

This proved a common thread throughout our 45-minute conversation. Having published her own music since 2020 and released her first album earlier this year, Olivia now sees marketing as a natural part of the creative process.

But it wasn’t always that way. When she was at university, running a show on the student radio station, she and a bunch of other students decided to facilitate a concert night featuring multiple artists.

“We booked these really big bands. We booked a massive hall. And then none of us wanted to market it. No one wanted to go out on the street and hand out flyers,” she said, laughing. “So it was, like, comically undersold.”

At the beginning of her music career, Olivia felt what many of us feel when we begin to self-promote: that she was being a bit repetitive (to put it mildly).

“When I have something time sensitive like a gig, or I’m running a workshop or something—what is it that people say? You need seven ‘impressions’ of something before you make the decision to engage. And you hear that and go, ‘That doesn’t sound like much,” and then you’re sending out your seventh email and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is so overkill.’”

This sense of repetition is something we’ll come back to momentarily, but in the meantime, I found it interesting that the antidote to Olivia’s cringey, am I being annoying? feelings was a strong sense of identity.

“I’ve made a more concentrated effort to tell people, you know, ‘I’m a singer-songwriter, and my day job is blah.’ Like, the artist [identity] comes first,” she told me. “I try to present myself in that way because then people know what they’re getting, and if people see me promote my gig for the bajillionth time, they understand that I’m just doing my thing.”

Because promoting their own work is just something creatives do.

“It’s sort of an internal conscious decision you need to make for yourself,” Olivia said. “You need to choose to see yourself as an artist. When you do that, it makes the job of promoting yourself so much easier, because you’re like, I’m doing my job.

“Give yourself permission to try it on.”

People are forgetful, so repetition is your friend.

Though I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve posted on Instagram about my book since it came out, I can’t help but imagine my followers groaning every time I do. Like, aren’t they tired of hearing about this thing?

Not necessarily. Odds are, they’ve forgotten it exists. And while that might be a bit sad if it applies to your friends or family—whose duty it is, I think, to be hyped about your work—it’s actually a great thing when it applies to random members of your audience, because it means you have permission to be as “annoying” as you want about what you’ve made.

“My career has been predominantly in the freelance sphere, so if there’s no self-promotion, there’s no work,” 2D narrative animator told me. “But the level to which I’m doing it has always come with this conflict of, ‘Is it too much?’”

Given the visual and digital nature of her work, Lori largely markets her animations online. With fairly limited avenues, it’s understandable that she sometimes feels like her promo is repetitive.

“I often ask myself, ‘Have I shared this clip too many times in the last 3 months? Do I need to find something else that can also make this point?’ But then you find that there are some things that just resonate with people,” Lori said. “I have this GIF that’s become my go-to, it’s from a small vignette I animated based on the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film. So it’s a GIF of this jaunty Bigfoot waving at the camera with a big smile. People love when I post that. But I worry that he, too, could wear out his welcome one day.”

What prevents Lori from just putting Bigfoot away for good, then?

“I think I stopped worrying so much about how often I was self-promoting with the Bigfoot GIF when I made it a center piece of me as an animator,” she said. “I changed some copy on my website to call it out to the effect of: Big Monsters, Even Bigger Personality.”

So there’s a bit of that whole “identity” thing again.

“I think my balance is accepting that I’d rather post the same clips over and over again and be remembered for that stuff than to worry that I’m being obnoxious and forgettable,” Lori noted. “Someone said, ‘You spent so much time crafting these videos. You’ve earned the excuse to share them as many times as you want.’”

And that’s a perfect segue into affirmation #3, which is…

It’s more about the art than it is about you.

When I was looking at launching my first business in 2018, I asked for advice from a successful entrepreneur I’d once copywritten for.

“How do I tell people about my business without looking sleazy or annoying?” I asked.

“It’s not about you,” she replied. “In the end, it’s about them. You’re solving a problem for them.”

Though art isn’t always utilitarian, it can solve problems. At its simplest, it’s entertainment; at its deepest, it can inform how someone thinks or makes a decision about conflict, perception, or self-fulfillment. Even the art some of us, in our most pretentious moments, consider “lowbrow” can at least solve the problem of what to watch on date night or read while recovering from the flu, but even then, the odds are good that someone has benefited from it in a deeper way.

“When people ask how I am or what I’m doing, I have to remind myself to not talk about something mundane, like the weather,” , a multidisciplinary artist and radio DJ, wrote in response to last month’s self-promo issue. “Talk about the art as much as you can.”

Because at the end of the day, what you’re attempting to sell—socially or in a literal, financial sense—probably isn’t you as much as it is your work. And how can someone know it exists, and therefore determine whether it could possibly fill some gap they’ve identified, if you never talk about it?

But Adrianna, it’s tempting to say in response to my own advice, how can my little book about UFOs and desert ephemera meaningfully solve anyone’s problems?

Ultimately, this isn’t up to me to decide. As an author, it’s simply my responsibility to put the book in front of them so that they can decide whether they want or need it.

“We all want to be demure and a little coy and to come off like it’s effortless. It’s like dating in a way,” Lori told me. “You want to be pursued, but you don’t want to do any of the pursuing. It doesn’t work that way! You’ve got to put yourself out there.”

If I may, I’d like to take Lori’s point a step further by suggesting that it’s less about putting yourself out there than about putting your work out there—and even allowing it to build a life of its own, as Olivia might put it.

“There are several reasons to promote a work, but first of all, the work is good and it deserves to exist,” Olivia told me. “Like, you just had a baby. It now has to live and go off to school and meet people and, like, it’s its own thing now, separate from you, you just have to nurture it. I just watched Frankenstein the other day. It really upset me to see that [Victor Frankenstein] spent all this time making this thing he’s so proud of, and the second it’s released, he just neglects it. He doesn’t want to nurture it, he doesn’t want to show it to the world. He doesn’t want anything to do with it. You can’t just put all your effort into the exciting research and production phase, you need to teach Frankenstein to read and get him into the world.”

Art can help people untangle mental, emotional, or spiritual quandaries—inward- or outward-facing, known or unbeknownst to them—by introducing perspectives or solutions they might not have thought about otherwise. Who are you to withhold the potential for that to happen, just because you’re sometimes insecure about what you’ve made or how you market it?

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. I knew I’d love this book when I listened to the intro about how, despite the rest of the United States’ constant demonization of the Southwest, the region is best seen as a foreshadowing of the country’s future (in terms of water access, climate change, and urban sprawl, at least). I also love that Paoletta approached the book as an exercise in understanding where he grew up.

✰ This post by about writing literary fiction that doesn’t drag.

✰ A newsletter issue by about the things she did to market her book and how well they worked.

✰ Lauren Oyler’s debut novel, Fake Accounts. While I’m not sure I liked the actual plot of this book, the voice pulled me through. Oyler has me thinking a lot about writing with specificity and dry humor, which I’ve always loved but sometimes have a tough time implementing.

Over the past few years, I’ve grown increasingly wary of the way we accumulate stuff—stuff under our beds, stuff in our closets, stuff in our garages, stuff in our desk drawers. It’s a sign of privilege distilled into thoughtless consumerism, this tendency to gift plastic tchotchkes (what I’ve come to call dust collectors) based on whatever fandom is popular at the moment, or to snap up seasonal candles just because they’re on sale.

Last year, this translated into a practice my partner and I called No Junk November, during which we became extremely critical of the items we bought for ourselves or others. If something wasn’t necessary or practical, it rarely made the cut. This year, I’m largely gifting experiences or consumables—think concert tickets, coffee shop gift cards, wine, and yummy-smelling bath products—in the hope that I’ll lessen my impact on the landfills and countries that receive our stuff after we throw it “away.”

No matter how many environmentally (and financially) friendly gifting rules I come up with, though, there will always be one exception: books.

Print books, ebooks, and audiobooks—like mine!—will always be top-tier gifts to me, whether I’m on the giving or receiving end. And while my favorite place to buy books is Changing Hands, an indie bookstore here in Phoenix, another favorite spot is Bookshop.org, which gives a whopping 80% of its profit margin to small bookstores all over the US and UK. Bookshop.org says 78% of its customers claim to have previously purchased books on Amazon prior to discovering the site, which means it’s also helping to funnel income away from Jeff Bezos’s miserable empire.

In anticipation of the holidays, I’ve pieced together some themed lists based on the reads I’m gifting this season, from breathtaking novellas to the books I turn to for a little hope and optimism. I’ve also gathered up a few recommendations for anyone who enjoyed my debut novella, Those Lights at Night.

Happy gifting!

Stunning novellas

I love novellas. Not because they’re “quick wins” or anything. but because it’s impressive how efficiently some authors can work plot, effective characterization, and resolution into a small form factor. To Be Taught, If Fortunate is such a gorgeous tale about humanity that it made me sob, and The Employees, a bizarre piece of sci-fi told in a series of HR testimonies, is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read.

Creativity & the craft of writing

I love that these books don’t rehash the same old creative/writing advice; they each feel like they have something new to offer. I’ve revisited Letters to a Writer of Color a few times since initially reading it a few years ago, and I just gifted Permission to a friend who sometimes fears the potential ramifications of writing about her personal life. And while I’m still working through the second half of Before and After the Book Deal, I love that Maum writes frankly (and hilariously) about the “taboo” parts of building a writing career, like advances and the awkward feelings that come with showing your work to the world.

For a bit of joy or hope

I can’t emphasize enough how much The Book of Delights—and Ross Gay’s accompanying Inciting Joy—have changed my gratitude practice for the better. The Anthropocene Reviewed also made it onto my “Favorite books of all time” list. If you (or your giftee) enjoy audiobooks, I highly recommend John Green’s narration.

Books that fixed me (a little bit)

Wintering, a book about embracing rest during both literal and personal winters, is a gorgeous gift for this time of year. I’ve loaned out Fear of Missing Out and The Midnight Library more times than I can count; oddly enough, both have been incredibly helpful for my OCD.

If you loved Those Lights at Night

The primary elements of my novella, Those Lights at Night1, are mystery, humor, tight-knit community, the question of what alien contact might look like IRL, and (of course) Southwest desert vibes. You can find various combinations of these themes in the books above; I particularly adore Desert Oracle (pretty much a book of modern fables and mysteries based in the Southwest) and The Mutual UFO Network.

Looking for more recommendations? Check out the rest of my curated reading lists—including literary masterpieces, sociopolitical justice primers, and my favorite books of all time—here!

And keep an eye out for a collaborative follow-up to Creativity Under Capitalism’s recent issue about the “cringe” of self-promotion!

Subscribe now

Since launching this newsletter in October 2023—more than two whole years ago!—I’ve stuck to a relatively consistent biweekly posting schedule. But that’s about to change.

Beginning now, on this random Friday, Creativity Under Capitalism won’t follow a strict posting schedule. Instead, I’ll deliver new issues when they’re ready, which could be twice in one week (at most; I’m not here to spam anyone) or once in a two-month span (i.e., summer break).

Why?

• Sticking to a specific cadence feels restrictive. While it’s helped me build some discipline over the past couple years, I’m strongly against saying stuff for the sake of having said something rather than for the sake of the thing being said. The former is how you fill the internet with fluff (AKA “content”). I’d rather deliver a high-value newsletter on a less consistent basis than a “meh” one on a schedule.

• I’d rather let curiosity and inspiration take the wheel. It’s easy to let a stroke of creative enthusiasm fly by when you’re more worried about the end product and its timing than the journey it takes to get there.

• The guidance keeps changing on when (and how often) you “should” publish a newsletter. Frankly, it’s all very maddening to keep up with.

• Flexibility is often the dividing line between something feeling like a privilege or a chore. That’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about this one.

I’ve loved writing Creativity Under Capitalism, and I’m stoked to see where I can take it with a little less internal pressure—I made up these dang rules to begin with, after all—and a little more freedom. Hope you’ll stick around to find out with me!

PS: The next issue will be a follow-up on my last, which was about the embarrassment and “cringey” feelings associated with self-promotion! Keep an eye out for some helpful tips and comforting anecdotes from a few kickass creatives. ✨

Read the last issue!

Sending desert sunshine and warmth until then!

It was 40 minutes before I had to be at the venue for my book launch party, and just under two hours until the party actually started. And instead of doing our makeup and fixing our hair like I’d promised my BFF we would, I was supine on my bed, an ice pack on my sternum and a YouTube breathing exercise on my phone.

In for one, two, three, four, hold…out for one, two, three, four.

I was having a bona-fide panic attack, but I couldn’t figure out why. I’d been stoked for my party for weeks. I’d had a lot of fun tracking down alien and UFO paraphernalia as decorations and party favors, and I’d just finished frosting a few dozen mini cupcakes with neon green buttercream and star-shaped sprinkles. My parents, sister, and childhood best friend had flown out, and all my closest friends in Arizona would be there. It was a massive privilege, I knew, to call so many of my loved ones to one space, especially just to celebrate me.

So why did I feel so miserable?

I reminded myself that I’d written and edited the perfect acknowledgements speech for mid-party, and my limbs went cold. I worried I’d puke. And it all became perfectly clear: It wasn’t the party I was anxious about. It was talking about “the work.”

The party was a blast, for the record, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in the few weeks since, it’s that promoting your own work is supremely embarrassing. When Spotify asked me to shoot a vertical-scroll video introducing myself and describing my book, I complied, but I shooed my boyfriend out of the house first (no one was gonna witness me stutter through my first Reel on my watch) and sweated the whole way through. Last time I watched a YouTube video about how to market your debut novel, I had to drive to the gym after, desperate to work off the anxious energy. And just now, at my Monday evening writing group, a dear friend had to prompt me to mention my new book as we all introduced ourselves to a newcomer.

I’m convinced that if a genie offered me the gift of shameless self-promotion, I’d accept, no matter the catch.

But, as I repeated ad nauseum in my recent post about supporting creatives in non-financial ways, people can’t buy something they don’t know exists—which means I must suck it up and locate within me something of a #grindsetmindset. In an effort to make my life a little easier, I’ve been trying to figure out what is at the core of promotional embarrassment. After all, some people don’t struggle with it: plenty of creatives have either overcome it or skipped it altogether. But for those of us who do, I think there are three forces at play.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Personal vulnerability

Creativity requires agency, and agency inherently involves the self. (The choices we make, when we are free to choose, are based on our experiences, values, and desires.) As a journalist, I’ve had more than a thousand pieces of my writing published, but there’s little room for “you” in journalism. Fiction, on the other hand, has “me” written all over it. Which, yeah, is the point—but for the unaccustomed, it’s also super embarrassing to drop countless personal Easter eggs into a creative work that is supposed to reach as many people as possible.

Social anxiety

This is probably my biggest one. I’m learning in real time that my long struggle with social anxiety is far from over and that my personal brand of OCD touches more of my life than I once thought. I hate drawing attention to myself, and I am, without exaggeration, constantly worrying about how other people see me and how those perceptions could alter my relationships (present and future). And as self-obsessed as it is to assume people are constantly grading my behavior or reputation—people have their own lives to worry about, duh—stopping that assumption in its tracks is harder than it sounds.

So, despite the truly unfathomable amount of “content” internet users encounter whenever they hop online, I’m worried that my own is so cringe that it’s memorable enough for people to hate me for it. Worse, the posts and videos I make will be visible to my own circles and to strangers online. How do you reconcile the uncomfortable merging of your private and public selves?

Economic awareness

This one’s just getting uglier. Here in the United States, people are losing jobs, health insurance, and access to food left and right, and inflation, stagnant wages, and other forms of financial inequality are shoving families toward (or below) the poverty level in droves. Many of us who technically make comfortable incomes (and/or have blessedly low living expenses) are nevertheless stressing over grocery prices and the rising cost of utilities. It feels straight-up stupid to ask people to spend $5-7 on an audiobook under these conditions.

In the weeks since my book’s launch, I’ve tried to keep in mind that it is a gift to struggle with promotional embarrassment—that just a few seasons ago, I was distraught over the possibility that Those Lights at Night would die on my hard drive. It’s a blessing, I keep telling myself, to have something to promote. But that doesn’t necessarily make the jitters easier to avoid. It just adds some gratitude to the emotional mix.

I’m interested in doing a follow-up to this post after hearing from other self-promoting creatives; ideally, I can turn this sweaty experience into a learning opportunity for both myself and anyone else who struggles with publicizing their work. I already have plans to chat with a couple wonderful artists, but if you’d like to offer your two cents, please feel free to drop a comment below or message me directly!

How do you manage promo anxiety?

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ Hervé Le Tellier’s stunning novel, The Anomaly. I’m not even finished with this yet, but the writing is gorgeous, and I can’t even remember the last time a book had me so at the edge of my seat. I almost don’t want to finish it, it’s so good.

✰ Jason Mott’s People Like Us, a work of autofiction packed with punchy voice and characterization. Parts of this novel made my heart hurt, in the best way.

✰ A cool art show my friends and I ran into during a day trip to Cottonwood, AZ. Called “Double Vision,” the event pairs photographers with painters, who select which photo they’d like to reimagine as a painting. Here are a few of my favorites! (Forgive the glare on some of the photos.)

If you’re just getting settled in, check out previous issues of Creativity Under Capitalism—and if you like what you see, consider leaving a comment or buying me a coffee to make my day!

I love getting a peek at how other people’s minds work, and hearing directly from an author about how they came up with and wrote their book is one of the best ways to do that. It’s so fun to learn about what inspired them, how they turned their idea into a complete manuscript, or the weird, real-life details that snuck their way into the story. It’s like the bonus content that came on 90s DVDs.

So, with my very first book, Those Lights at Night, officially out as of this week (order it on Spotify, Apple Books, Libro.fm, Audible, or wherever else you buy audiobooks), I figured it’d be fun to share a little “bonus content” of my own. I plan on sharing a lot of this information via social media in the coming weeks—gotta market this thing somehow, you know?—but I wanted to share it here, with my favorite digital circle, first. Whether you’ve listened to Those Lights at Night already or haven’t heard of it before now, I hope you enjoy!

First, the back-of-the-book blurb…

Bare Buttes is like any other California desert town: hot, dusty, and known best for its tourism. But unlike flashy Palm Springs or hipster Joshua Tree, Bare Buttes isn’t known for pool parties or hiking—its draw is its extraterrestrial visitors.

No one living outside the town needs to know that Bare Buttes’ “alien abductions” are fake, organized a few times each year by its small but spunky Performance Committee. The committee sustains just enough hype to avoid suspicion while keeping tourists interested, which is perfect for Juniper Flatts, the owner of a humble UFO-themed gift shop that she inherited from her mother. But when a series of real abductions occurs—each involving a mysterious flying vehicle not terribly unlike the Performance Committee’s simulations—and Juniper’s best friend and love interest goes missing, she takes it upon herself to find out who’s responsible for the chaos.

Juniper’s head-spinning investigation threatens to unravel the town’s carefully constructed image, and with it, the last thing Juniper’s late mother left her. By working with her neighbors to connect the dots, Juniper discovers the orchestrator behind her community’s biggest nightmare. Going head-to-head with him leads Juniper to a nauseating crossroads: sell out her community, or do the right thing, even at great personal cost.

Basically, if you’re into bizarro desert settings, communities that rally together, a borderline tacky obsession with regional cryptid/supernatural sightings, and cutesy queer pining, you’ll probably like TLaN.

How I got the idea for Those Lights at Night

The “elevator pitch” for my novella is: A California desert town that regularly fakes alien abductions to attract tourists suddenly faces a series of real abductions involving mysterious UFOs. But elevator pitches rarely get to the meat of the story. While Those Lights at Night is a fun and quirky mystery, it’s built on criticism of the growth-at-all-costs tech industry (something I’ve grown intimately familiar with, as a former tech worker and current tech journalist), the leeway modern society has given selfish billionaires, and grief.

Though I can’t remember exactly how the idea conveyed in the elevator pitch came to me, I’ve always been charmed by the American Southwest’s obsession with UFO sightings and alien-inspired artwork. And Joshua Tree is one of my favorite places on Earth: it’s gorgeous, it’s resilient, it’s downright weird. I think a part of me lives out there. So while TLaN’s primary setting, Bare Buttes, is fictional, the space it’s surrounded by is not, and it was all too easy to imagine what it’d be like for UFOs to swoop in from out of nowhere.

Finally, TLaN was my venture into writing something fun. Prior to writing this novella, I’d written a novel driven by what I thought “the market” (that nebulous thing none of us can really nab) would want to see. It had drama, it had way too many characters, and it had social commentary on things I probably had no business commenting on in the first place. It was “serious.” And it was boring. When it came down to editing the thing—my least favorite part of any long-form project—I realized I had zero interest in enduring all of that. So I walked away, promising myself I’d only write stuff I really enjoyed going forward.

Pictures and places that inspired me during the writing process

So, I have no idea where this image came from. It could be from this Reddit post; it could be older. I saw it on Tumblr a few years ago and couldn’t get it out of my head. Not only does this sign imply that alien abductions are normal enough in this area that 3 is simply too many for one week, but there’s a council that can do something about it? 😮‍💨

While most of the places in TLaN are entirely made up, the gift shop my protagonist, Juniper, owns takes after Coyote Corner, a little place in Joshua Tree that looks like it came straight out of the Wild West. Pretty much everything they sell there is a little too on-the-nose, just like Juniper’s wacky curios.

Juniper’s name also comes from an area at Joshua Tree National Park: the Juniper Flats backcountry zone. When I drove past the sign during a visit to JTNP several years ago, I instantly knew the name “Juniper Flats” had main character energy.

What it’s like debuting in audio format

I began submitting TLaN to indie presses late last year, after a few rounds of edits and a handful of very helpful beta reads. In March 2025, with many of those submissions pending and me waiting for the next round of presses to open their inboxes, I saw that Spotify had put out a call for shorter-form genre fiction. I knew my novella would make for a great audio experience, so I submitted it.

Spotify offered me a publishing deal in August. If I’m honest, I was a bit wary at first: As we write long pieces of fiction, most of us dream of one day showing it off in print, and this was a different path. (I’d also just started playing Split/Fiction with my partner and was maaaybe a little worried about a powerful company snatching a bunch of writers’ intellectual property with less-than-savory intentions.) I’m incredibly grateful that I was able to consult with a trusted group of writer friends, one of whom worked for a stint in the publishing industry; they helped me realize the deal’s potential, and roughly a week later, I said yes.

One of the great advantages of debuting in audio format is a complete lack of necessity for patience. It usually takes an author about two years to go from acquisition to print debut, but in this case, it took less than three months for me to graduate from writer to author. I had some input on who my narrator would be and what they’d sound like—go Lindsey Dorcus!—but otherwise, everything was in the hands of my team at Spotify, who (thank goodness) kept me in the loop with every step.

Though of course it’d be fun to sell physical, printed copies of TLaN, I’m fully satisfied knowing how accessible the story will be in audio format. Beyond being free to anyone with a Spotify Premium membership, a single audio copy of TLaN costs less than a market-rate latte, making it an easier sell for someone like me, who hates asking people to spend money on something she made. (Side note: I fully plan on writing an issue about this type of awkwardness, because whew, I’ve been sweating lately.) Plus, people can listen on the go!

And while TLaN debuted as an audiobook, nothing’s to say it won’t take another form in the future… Stay tuned. 😉

Got any questions about Those Lights at Night, novella publishing, or what it was like to work with Spotify?

I’d love to answer them in the comments below!

Leave a comment

And don’t forget to snag your copy of Those Lights at Night wherever audiobooks are sold! Most platforms have a 5-minute preview, if you want to try before you buy.

Listen to Those Lights at Night

If you’re just getting settled in, check out previous issues of Creativity Under Capitalism—and if you like what you see, consider leaving a comment or buying me a coffee to make my day!

For now, I’m testing a new post cadence: Instead of receiving an issue every other Friday, you’ll get a new issue every other Wednesday. Thanks for your patience while I try this out! We’ll see if it sticks.

Also, this and future issues of Creativity Under Capitalism will be accompanied by an audio version, so you can listen on the go! Sorry in advance for when my cats inevitably meow in the background; otherwise, I hope you enjoy.

How do you support the writers, artists, and other makers in your life? And when you hear the word “support,” do you automatically think of the financial kind? If so, you’re not alone.

This summer, I asked Creativity Under Capitalism readers to share what they struggle with at the intersection of, well, creativity and capitalism. I received some very helpful insights (thank you for those!), among which was a comment from about struggling to decide when to provide monetary support for another Substacker’s work. Paid subscription options abound—many of them $5 per month, some a little more—but that money quickly adds up when you’re supporting multiple writers, or, in Jude’s experience at the time, not pulling in any income.

This issue becomes even more complicated when you yourself are asking Substack users to support your newsletter with $5 or so each month; you can end up swapping the same Abe Lincoln around, which feels a little silly.

Jude’s comment made me wonder how we can support the creatives in our communities with little to no money, whether those people are family members, close friends, or strangers who live on the other side of town. It also got me thinking about how emerging, underground, and grassroots art economies often defy the economic models we’ve been taught are normal and trustworthy—and whether it’s a bad thing that they do.

All of us need money to live, and in an ideal world—Ireland, apparently—we’d have access to that money without having to strive for capitalism’s horrifically skewed definition of merit. Until we get there, most of us are stuck making money via some sort of labor and then spending that money on one of two things: stuff we need and stuff we want.

Often, art falls into the second category. (There are some forms of art, like food, that we need to live, but most of us will not die if we don’t buy a book, see a movie, or purchase a bespoke wool sweater.) Meanwhile, those who make art for a living—or are actively trying to make that their primary source of income—need to exchange their creative labor for money. This puts the creative in a tough spot: The creative needs their audience’s money, but their audience is under zero obligation to provide it.

To Jude’s point, it puts the audience member in a tough spot, too. Many of us want nothing more than to fling money at creative people in exchange for literature and cool photographs and tapestries and felted animal figures. Life is boring without those things. But we have to pick and choose.

On the creative’s side, there are strategies that might tip the audience member’s scales in one direction or another: offering increased “value” via behind-the-scenes looks, subscriber-only chats, and so on; emphasizing the handmade/small biz component by tucking handwritten thank you cards into orders or offering one-on-one attention; or connecting a body of work to a cause the audience really cares about, among others. If a person really likes you or your work, this might nudge them toward supporting you financially when they would have otherwise spent that money on, say, takeout or a new houseplant.

But what if that person doesn’t have room in their budget for non-necessities, and therefore can’t afford the takeout, the houseplant, or your work? What if, at the time they come across your work, they’ve exhausted their “want” budget for the week/month/year? Or what if you’re the one who wants desperately to support another creative, but doesn’t have any cash sitting around?

It’s time to turn to community support.

Even if a creative’s sole goal is to make money (which is rarely the case), they rely on forms of support that are not immediately financial in nature. People can’t buy a product they don’t know about, but in order to find out it exists, people need to talk about it. And in order to talk about something, one needs to build some form of relationship with that thing.

This is the essence of community (i.e. non-financial) support. Every time someone builds a relationship with a creative work, the potential for that work’s financial and cultural impact grows.

The good news is that, for the creative, helping one’s audience build a relationship with one’s work is often more fun than trying to convince them point-blank to hand over their money. Meanwhile, the audience gets to save their money—for now, at least; maybe that’ll change later, maybe not!—while knowing that they are still supporting an artist’s work. In the absence of abundant cash, this is a win-win.

In practice, community support looks like…

• Sharing the article your local news organization wrote about the bakery that just opened down the street

• Attending the video game launch party, author Q&A, or art gallery opening (or, if you can’t make it, sharing the flyer or social media post about it with folks who might be interested)

• Sending an “I thought of you!” text to the friend who’d totally love that book or print or jewelry you just stumbled upon

• Reading or listening to the interview an emerging artist did with an industry blog or podcast

• Taking and sharing pictures at the art fair

• Having more conversations about the art you find interesting or inspiring1

• Requesting that your local library carry the book you want to read

• Suggesting that book to your book club

• Nominating your favorite works for awards, prizes, and other forms of recognition (or voting for them, if voting is open to the public)

• Posting an enthusiastic review on Letterboxd, StoryGraph, Goodreads, Reddit, et cetera (and tagging that review appropriately—thanks for sharing that bit!)

• Sending enthusiastic feedback2 to the artist directly

Engaging meaningfully in these ways escalates someone from audience member or customer to “creative citizen,” a term I began using after seeing Tin House co-founder Rob Spillman refer to himself as a “literary citizen.” Though it is a form of support, purchasing work from a creative person is transactional and often one-and-done, while making a habit of uplifting and discussing creative work establishes a longer-term and more robust relationship with that work and the community that surrounds it.

And creative citizenship is at the heart of many emerging, local, or DIY art scenes. When a creative person is surrounded by other creatives, it’s just not practical for them to make financial support their sole or primary response to other people’s works. Best case scenario, they’d all end up trading the same money around; worst case, they’d be broke all the time. Neither sounds very fun.

This is why I insist that my own readers (on Substack and elsewhere) not feel bad when they can’t offer support of the financial variety. Yes, I depend on my audience to buy my book—an exciting development we’ll get to shortly!—so I can show publishers how well-loved my work is and hopefully publish more books in the future. But people can’t buy my book if they don’t know it exists, and I only have so much reach, so I also depend on my audience to bring my book to their own communities. Whether they’ve already purchased a copy or can’t afford one at all, those who share my work with others are just as important to me as those who buy.

We live in such a money-centered world that it’s easy to forget how important non-financial forms of support are. Without those manifestations of enthusiasm or inspiration, however, the whole “community” leg of the creative lifestyle crumbles—and that’s why many of us create in the first place.

BIG NEWS!

In lieu of a “what’s been inspiring me lately” section, I have a special announcement: my first book, Those Lights at Night, is available to pre-save on Spotify and pre-order via Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Audible, and more! The audiobook officially comes out November 4. ‪‪❤︎‬

Produced by Spotify (under its brand-new Spotify Audio Selects imprint) and narrated by the wonderful Lindsey Dorcus, Those Lights at Night is a quirky, (mostly) lighthearted mystery built on sapphic pining, sarcastic dialogue, criticism of the growth-at-all-costs tech industry, and a very punchy setting.

Here’s the back-of-the-book blurb:

Bare Buttes is like any other California desert town: hot, dusty, and known best for its tourism. But unlike flashy Palm Springs or hipster Joshua Tree, Bare Buttes isn’t known for pool parties or hiking—its draw is its extraterrestrial visitors.

No one living outside the town needs to know that Bare Buttes’ “alien abductions” are fake, organized a few times each year by its small but spunky Performance Committee. The committee sustains just enough hype to avoid suspicion while keeping tourists interested, which is perfect for Juniper Flatts, the owner of a humble UFO-themed gift shop that she inherited from her mother. But when a series of real abductions occurs—each involving a mysterious flying vehicle not terribly unlike the Performance Committee’s simulations—and Juniper’s best friend and love interest goes missing, she takes it upon herself to find out who’s responsible for the chaos.

Juniper’s head-spinning investigation threatens to unravel the town’s carefully constructed image, and with it, the last thing Juniper’s late mother left her. By working with her neighbors to connect the dots, Juniper discovers the orchestrator behind her community’s biggest nightmare. Going head-to-head with him leads Juniper to a nauseating crossroads: sell out her community, or do the right thing, even at great personal cost.

Finally, if you live in or around Phoenix, I’m throwing a release party on November 4! I’d love to see you there.

If you’re just getting settled in, check out previous issues of Creativity Under Capitalism—and if you like what you see, consider leaving a comment or buying me a coffee to make my day!

If you’ve hit a roadblock on your current project—or you can’t figure out which project you should start next—do you know what you should do about it?

Absolutely nothing. Intentional nothing, that is.

For much of this year, when I struggled to balance too much writing-for-pay (a blessing and a curse) with not enough writing-for-fun (my raison d’être), I realized that it wasn’t always being busy that kept me feeling stressed 24/7. It was having too few opportunities for boredom. When I wasn’t working one gig, I was working another; when I wasn’t working at all, I was exercising or meal planning or handling my fair share of housework or scheduling my cats’ vet appointment or attending said appointment or trying to make time for my friends; when I wasn’t doing any of those things, I was mentally preparing myself for work again. Not only did I have very few chances to slow down and catch my breath, but I almost never had the opportunity to think of nothing at all.

And when I did come across such an occasion? I filled the mental silence with someone else’s thoughts, as so many of us are used to doing nowadays.

Much ink has been spilled already on how uncomfortable humans are with boredom and how easily modern technology fills the gap, helping us to avoid ever feeling bored at all. There’s the famous experiment in which adults were asked to sit in a quiet room with no entertainment, alone except for a button that would deliver an electric shock when pushed; bored out of their minds, anywhere from 25% of participants (women) to 67% (men) chose to shock themselves just to experience something. There’s the occasional study suggesting that, when we don’t feel stimulated enough, we “phub,” or snub our environment in favor of looking at our phones. And we know that the people who make our mobile devices—and the apps on them—pay obscene amounts of money to ensure they steal as much of our attention as possible. The UX engineers they hire are the best of the best at making us feel like we need to keep scrolling for “just another minute.”

Who could be bored under such circumstances?

But for all this talk about how we use technology to avoid boredom, many of us continue to struggle with believing our own company is enough. We delete one addictive app but keep another installed, insisting that it’s necessary for whatever reason. We listen to podcasts while we fold laundry. We check our email while we wait in line at the grocery store.

What is it that makes boredom so repulsive, even when we know constant entertainment isn’t good for us?

Arthur Brooks, head of the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory at Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership, hypothesizes that boredom is inherently uncomfortable because it forces us to consider deep and complicated topics: what gives our lives meaning, what makes us happy or unhappy, and so on.

As he puts it in this YouTube video for Harvard Business Review, a lack of active cognitive engagement switches on the brain’s “default mode network,” a set of neural structures that activate when you’re not thinking about any particular thing. When the default mode network is on, the brain is free to wander, often settling on the matters that tug at the back of your head. Am I truly happy in my relationship? How might I want to build a career? What kind of art lights a fire within me, and how do I make some?

That these thoughts are challenging needs no explanation, and it’s easy to sympathize with anyone who’d rather look at a stupid Reel than engage with their life’s messy inner structure. But avoiding the default mode network has consequences, both for our overall mental wellbeing and for our creativity.

“One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression and anxiety in our society today is because people don’t know the meaning of their lives, much less than in previous generations. Tons of data show this, and furthermore, we’re not even looking,” Brooks says. “We’ve figured out a way to eliminate boredom. We’ve been able, almost completely, to shut off the default mode network…The answer is that thing in your pocket with the screen, which you take out even when you’re standing on the street corner, waiting for the light to change.

“That’s a doom loop of meaning. That’s the recipe for…a sense of hollowness.”

Hearing Brooks’ perspective, it makes perfect sense that by avoiding boredom, we deny ourselves the opportunity to understand ourselves—and, therefore, our art. How can we parse the themes that matter to us when we ignore those themes wholesale? How can we know what chords to strike when we refuse to listen to the music?

But there’s more.

In researching this topic, I came across an early episode of the design podcast Woodworking Is Bullsh*t. During the first two minutes of the episode (called “Does Boredom Drive Creativity?”), co-host, sculptor, and woodworker Erik Curtis lights a firecracker: “I think giving yourself the ability to kind of block out other voices as you’re kind of honing in on your own is a necessary thing for development.”

I paused in front of my fridge as I heard this, having violated the central rule of my own newsletter post by listening to the episode as I did chores. I’d never heard the constant need for entertainment described in this way before. I’d never considered that every time I leaned on social media, YouTube, music, or, yes, even podcasts to avoid activating the default mode network, I wasn’t just filling a silence—I was replacing my own thoughts with someone else’s during some of my best opportunities to think.

And it makes sense. Any time my social media use goes up, my confidence and sense of self-efficacy goes down. It’s not just because I’m jealous about someone else’s fancy house or comparing my relatively quiet career with an acquaintance’s flashy one. It’s because my brain has been stuffed with other people’s ideas, problems, values, and priorities. There’s little room for me to be solid in what I want and don’t want. All I’ve seen is what other people care about.

Because I’m certain someone will try to get me on a technicality here, I’m not saying it’s always toxic to seek out other people’s perspectives or ideas. Doing so upholds a fundamental pillar of community—when it’s done correctly. It’s one thing to attend a Zoom salon, ask your grandma for life advice, read a book you never thought you’d pick up, or meet a bunch of your friend’s friends at a party. It’s another to teeter on the edge of self-exploration and choose other people’s journeys nearly every time.

And we’d better choose self-exploration when and where we can.

“I think it’s pretty clear that we live now in a society that actively tries to avoid us being bored,” Curtis continues in episode 5 of Woodworking Is Bullsh*t. “Because when we’re bored, we’re not making people money, right?”

It all goes back to what I mentioned earlier, about how some of the most influential people on the planet want us to be as occupied as possible. The busier we are, the more we seek solutions: packaged foods, desk treadmills, daycare centers (of the child and dog varieties), and the fleeting thrill of a new package at our doorstep, purchased when we had insufficient time to create joy in any other form. If we had free time, we might actually spend time with our families, or cook our own meals, or take public transit, or hike a mountain, or organize our neighborhoods and workplaces. We might find ways to lean more on our communities than on convenience.

So, while we can’t exactly blame ourselves for having limited time during which to be bored, we can practice accepting boredom during the small windows of time that are afforded to us. We can be more mindful of when and how we look for entertainment. Are we genuinely interested in this YouTube video’s subject matter, or are we just used to watching something while we scarf down lunch? Does this podcast actually have us locked in, or are we just bored whenever we walk the dog?

Maybe we won’t have a life-changing revelation every time we wash the dishes in silence, but we’ll at least know more about ourselves.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ A beautiful art show I attended with a friend last month. Each summer, Phoenix architectural photographer Andrew Pielage hosts “Monsoon Show,” where he displays other photographer’s stunning monsoon shots at the art gallery he attached to his home. He also plays professionally-shot monsoon time-lapses on a projector in his backyard, where attendees can sit on the artificial turf with a cup of donated local beer. Seeing so many people delight in one of our region’s most captivating weather phenomena made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. If you’re local, get a $5 ticket for closing night—you won’t want to miss it!

✰ The season finale of Murderbot (on Apple TV). Whew, I wanted to cry! If you watch this show, please message me so we can gab about it.

✰ Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. This is a relatively dry text, but it goes a long way in the “restoring faith in humanity” department.

✰ Endurance, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly’s extensive memoir about what it was like to spend a year on the International Space Station. I listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Kelly himself and taught me a lot of cool stuff I’ll undoubtedly use as I dip my toes into writing near-term sci-fi.

✰ Milk Blood Heat, Dantiel W. Moniz’s debut story collection. I loved the interiority demonstrated in each of these juicy stories.

✰ The Best Short Stories 2025, an annual anthology of O. Henry Prize-winning stories. I adored last year’s collection, and I’m stoked to have found so far that this one’s just as good! (The Best Short Stories is far better than the US-centric The Best American Short Stories anthology, IMO.)

If you’re just getting settled in, check out previous issues of Creativity Under Capitalism—and if you like what you see, consider leaving a comment or buying me a coffee to make my day!

We’re back with another inter-review of a bespoke distraction-busting device—and this one’s with me!

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of an inter-review, it’s a silly (but, dare I say, convenient) format that combines the interview with the ever-ubiquitous product review. Rather than simply throwing out blocks of text that expound on the benefits and disadvantages of, say, the Freewrite Alpha, I ask someone questions about their experience using that device, and their answers help you determine whether it’s right for you.

This inter-review is all about Brick, a device you may have seen advertised on social media. And it’s with me, because I happened to buy Brick shortly before publishing Creativity Under Capitalism’s first inter-review.

But first…what is Brick?

Brick is a little magnetic square aimed at helping you reduce the amount of time you spend on your phone. Each square contains an NFC tag, a passive chip that activates when a paired device comes in contact with it. To set it up, you tap Brick with your phone, pairing the two devices. From there on out, tapping Brick will block or unblock sets of apps that you determine within the Brick app. You cannot end a Brick session (i.e. unblock your blocked apps) without physically tapping your phone against the Brick, save for five “emergency unbricks” that, once you use them up, cannot be restored.

Now that you know what Brick is, let’s jump into the review!

Adrianna: How long have you had Brick, and what drew you to it in the first place?

Also Adrianna: Ironically, I'd received several ads for Brick (all while doomscrolling) before ultimately deciding to buy it. At the time, I was skeptical; I figured it was a smartphone user's responsibility to set healthier boundaries with their device, not a gadget’s job to set those boundaries for them. (After all, capitalism is all about selling us solutions to problems it created.)

But then I started noticing how frequently I opened distracting, time-sucking apps and websites—Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, and Substack—without really thinking about it first. When I was packing for Orion Magazine's Environmental Writers' Summer Workshop this June, I realized that a tool like Brick might help me take full advantage of the week-long retreat by eliminating phone-based distractions. At minimum, the trip offered a good opportunity to try out Brick and write an honest review. So I bought the device online and had it shipped to the Omega Institute, where the retreat took place, and was lucky that it arrived on the first day.

I used Brick sparingly for the first month or two. I'd been off Instagram since January, which made it relatively easy to avoid wasting my time on my phone; I occasionally squandered some time on Reddit (in my browser) and Tumblr, but it was nothing like being sucked into "true" social media, with all its manipulative language and algorithms. This changed when I signed a publishing deal for my debut novella in August, and I realized that I'd finally have to start marketing myself as an author—including on Instagram. (Boo, hiss, shudder, tomato, etc.)

How much did you pay for Brick?

I paid $53.10 (10% off $59 using the promo code WELCOME10) plus $20 express shipping via Brick's website, since I decided I wanted it just a couple days before the retreat began. At this time, it seems you can only purchase Brick through the website or secondhand; e-commerce retailers don't carry it.

How do you use Brick?

I keep Brick on my fridge. Because my kitchen is on the middle floor of a three-story townhouse (where my office is on the first floor and my bedroom on the third), I find that this is the perfect spot: I'm lazy and don't want to walk up or down the stairs, so if I'm working or reading in bed, I won't get up to unbrick my phone.

I also switch between three different Brick modes depending on my needs. The first, which I call "Life," only blocks Instagram. I use this mode pretty much all the time, as I'm trying to keep my Instagram use super intentional; I only unbrick when I'm posting something or I want to see what pastries my favorite coffee truck is carrying that morning. (Their strawberry cream cheese scone unfortunately has a chokehold on me.) "Mental Health" blocks Instagram, email (I compulsively check my email when I'm anxious), and Firefox (where I visit Reddit and Substack); I use this one when I'm overwhelmed by the news or feel like I'm looking at my phone too much. "Writing" blocks everything but the dumbphone essentials: calls, texts, calculator, camera, and so on.

What is the device's battery life like?

RFC chips—the technology Brick is based on—are 100% passive, which means they don't need a battery! You don't have to charge Brick.

What do you love about Brick?

The advantage of Brick over native screen time features or time-saving apps is that unblocking blocked apps is much harder than guiltily tapping a button on your screen. You only get one physical Brick device, so unless you carry it around with you (which would defeat the whole purpose), there’s a great deal of friction whenever you want to unbrick. This means if I'm working and I attempt to check Instagram, I always shrug it off and go back to my work instead of caving to Mark Zuckerberg's ultimate demand, which is to waste my one wild and precious life watching endless Reels that misuse the term "POV."

I also love that the Brick app has a schedule option. I don't use it much, as my schedule varies from day to day, but I appreciate that I could automatically block certain apps on a consistent basis without having to visit my fridge first.

What do you dislike about Brick?

The app's user interface can be a little clunky, but it's definitely improved in just the few months since I bought Brick. I also wish Brick could block individual websites within Firefox, not just the phone's native browser (Safari, in my case), as this would prevent me from having to block all of Firefox whenever I want to avoid Reddit and the news.

Do you feel that you can focus more easily with Brick?

Sort of. Focusing and reducing distractions are two different things, and I certainly feel that Brick helps me with the latter. I'll admit that for the first few days of keeping go-to apps bricked, there's a sense of panic that has me frantically opening second-choice apps like Weather and Photos in search of a dopamine hit, but that eventually fades. If anything, those moments of panic are eye-opening. None of us should be that dependent on social media.

Beyond making it impossible for me to doomscroll at certain times, though, shaping my ability to focus isn't Brick's responsibility. It's on me to reinforce positive habits and exercise some degree of discipline, which includes making it clear to my social circle that creating is important to me, embracing my creative seasons, celebrating my wins, and building routines that help me get into the artistic mindset.

If a friend told you they were struggling to put their phone down and could afford Brick, would you recommend it to them? What tips would you give them if they purchased it?

Absolutely! Especially right now, when the world feels absolutely chaotic and there’s an endless amount of terrible news to scroll through, I’ve found Brick to be a helpful tool in terms of my mental health and my creative practice. For anyone else who tends to open certain apps/sites by muscle memory alone, Brick could be similarly useful.

My #1 tip would be to keep Brick in an inconvenient place to avoid unbricking whenever you feel that compulsive itch to check social media. Maybe you don't have stairs to use to your advantage, but can you keep Brick in your car? On the top shelf of a messy closet? At the bottom of a deep freezer?! (Maybe ask the Brick team first whether that one is safe to do.)

One other thing…

This is not a sponsored issue; I purchased Brick with my own money, and the team has no idea I’ve written this review. However, like anyone else who purchases Brick directly from the Brick website, I have a referral link that will give you $10 off and give me $10 back. So, if you decide to purchase Brick—or you tell a friend about it—consider using that link for a discount and to buy me an overpriced latte!

A few years ago, when I missed being a first responder1 so much that I applied to become a crisis response volunteer with the Phoenix Fire Department, I asked a professor at my alma mater to write me a letter of recommendation. What she came up with was incredibly kind, but letters of recommendation are hardly trustworthy if they only offer a glowing review of the person they’re about, so to offset her positive feedback, my former professor threw in a harmless piece of constructive criticism—the kind you’re supposed to offer about yourself when a job interviewer asks you about your biggest weakness.

Adrianna sometimes bites off more than she can chew, she wrote.

It’s been six years, and those words are still true.

I’ve always been a fan of dabbling. My guest room closet is crammed full of art supplies specific to different activities that I’ve picked up for a month or two at a time: air dry clay, crochet, acrylic paints, beads. I get high off of setting boisterous goals. I’m your best friend’s lame-ass boyfriend who always seems to be announcing a new business venture.

But actually sustaining these efforts is much harder than starting them. It’s not for a lack of interest—I genuinely think daisy bead bracelets are cute and that I could have been great at running my own copywriting agency, the website for which I officially cancelled on Squarespace this week—and I’m perfectly fine with being bad at something until I learn how to do it properly. It’s just that juggling multiple dissonant responsibilities is, well…hard.

Part of the problem is time. There are only so many hours in the day, no matter how many household tasks you’re able to pawn off on your partner or outsource via paid work. It’s also hard to switch from one mental or emotional state to the next; many of us need some sort of transition state in between, making it challenging to juggle our professional lives, family duties, romantic partnerships, social lives, health, creative work, hobbies, and proper sleep without something slipping from our grasp.

The issue of limited time and energy is so thoroughly discussed that it almost feels mundane to refer to here. But there’s more to “balancing everything” (as my friends and I seem to put it ad nauseum) than just these two elements. Over the last handful of months, I’ve recognized that something seems to be missing from most of these conversations: deep knowledge.

That’s what I find missing from a life of dabbling.

Last month, I visited the lovely in Seattle. She took me to the Burke Museum, where visitors have the privilege of seeing how archaeologists, paleontologists, zoologists, and geologists work behind the scenes. Many of the museum’s internal walls are made of glass, allowing a peek at these researchers’ workspaces, where expensive science equipment gleams and whiteboards explain ongoing projects.

As we shuffled from exhibit to exhibit and wall to wall, a mix of melancholy and envy settled over me.

“Wouldn’t it be so nice to be an expert in something?” I asked Auzin, adding that I hoped I was a scientist in a parallel universe. “Like, you know everything there is to know about one specific thing.”

I haven’t fully escaped that feeling since. In fact, it grew when I finally listened to a Rehash episode recommended to me by a friend, in which a fairly accomplished poet was asked to weigh in on the everlasting Rupi Kaur debate. I wanted—still want—to know what it feels like to be asked to weigh in, to have so much deep knowledge of a subject that you’re considered somewhat of an expert.

But I can’t. Part of the problem is that I’m 29 years old, and pretending I’m an expert on anything other than myself would probably be ridiculous. Most of the problem is that the path I’m on (or the way-too-many paths, one might say) probably won’t lead me to the type of extensive wisdom I craved as I roamed the museum with Auzin. I’m simply doing too many things.

Since joining Substack in October 2023, I’ve seen dozens (if not hundreds) of users post Notes railing against the idea of “niching down.” According to these posts, every creative has two options: choose a niche and stick to it, or flit from topic to topic (or genre to genre) at will. For writers, picking a niche might mean building a newsletter or list of clips that focuses entirely on pop culture; for a filmmaker, this could mean producing only horror films.

Those who oppose the concept of niching down are often worried about feeling boxed in. What if pondering pop culture week after week leaves them feeling numb? What if they decide a decade from now that horror bores them? If they want to start writing about the wellness industry or pivot to documentary filmmaking, will they be barred from doing so, either by their own expectations or others’?

These are valid concerns. It’s intimidating to imagine that you might one day be so afraid of disrupting your own status quo that you don’t explore new things. There’s also a solid argument to be made for branching out for the sake of it, like testing outfits in a fitting room or “experimenting” during college. Trying new things is often a necessary part of finding ourselves.

But what happens when you spend so long engaging with things at surface level that you simply lack the time, energy, or resources to go deeper? You miss out on wisdom—deep-seated knowledge that could potentially lead to more satisfying or meaningful engagement, make it easier to “lock in,” or open the door to more intimate relationships with others within that niche.

I don’t wish I were a scientist in this universe because I like what I do now: writing. By spreading myself too thin, though—by trying on a too few many hats, professionally and creatively—I’ve prevented myself from building the know-how that would make my work easier. Not only has this potentially held me back from scoring cool career opportunities, but it’s produced an underlying frustration: the sense that, despite all of my hard work, I’m not really progressing.

This isn’t uncommon. Writing is a tough gig, especially when someone’s starting out, and those who want to get paid for it can’t always be choosy at first. For a while, it was a matter of simply taking whatever work I could get.

But now, having tried out a hefty handful of niches, I’m ready to settle down. It’s harder than I ever would have expected to juggle even the intermediate level of expertise necessary to write confidently about several disparate concepts. How am I supposed to maintain an intimate enough relationship with every niche to know what’s happening within them at any given moment? How do I familiarize myself with each niche’s background and refer back to it on a moment’s notice? Who and what are my go-to resources in every niche? And most importantly, how do I convince readers that what I have to say is important if I’m barely engaged with the topic at hand myself?

I can’t change how many hours there are in a day. The only realistic path forward is to narrow my focus to a level that makes deep engagement possible, pleasant, and sustainable. Does that mean ditching curiosity and writing about one thing forever and ever? Of course not. Does it mean prioritizing the pursuit of wisdom over the often-fleeting desire to hop from one niche to the next? Sometimes, yeah.2

I never actually became a crisis response volunteer for the fire department, by the way. I stopped attending training three sessions in.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ Phoenix’s first real monsoon season in a few years. When it’s sunny 300+ days per year, cloudy and stormy days start to feel extra special—and I don’t think a quick snort of post-rain desert air has ever failed to energize someone.

✰ Mesquite pods. The way their tough little seeds take root in hard, dry ground and produce ultra-heat-tolerant baby trees reminds me of one of many reasons I love the desert: it’s so resilient. I currently have a handful of mesquite volunteers in my tiny yard; a couple are over two feet tall!

✰ Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. Though I didn’t love this novel’s characterization and pacing, the style and sense of humor were perfection. Batuman makes me want to embrace my dry humor more.

✰ A cool interview I did with a roboticist during my final week at SFGATE. Some of the inspirations and work she shared with me had me cooking up a short story idea real quick!

Hi, dear Creativity Under Capitalism readers!

As the title suggests, this isn’t exactly a “real” issue of the newsletter. I knew at the start of the week—when I normally sit down to work on a new issue—that I probably wouldn’t write anything super helpful or meaningful this time around. I’m very tired, physically and mentally and emotionally, and I think my brain needs a moment to catch up with the world and my increasingly busy life. (A lot has changed recently, and a lot will continue to change.)

That means I’m taking a week off from writing an official Creativity Under Capitalism issue. Instead, I’ve curated a brief list of reading recommendations that I hope will find you as you need them. I know that newsletters are full of curated lists, and we hardly need another one, but I love a good reading recommendation (heck, I took one from some graffiti recently1). Maybe you will, too.

First, though, I have a quick question for you. Writing a newsletter sometimes feels a bit unidirectional—there’s some engagement via comments and shares, but otherwise, it’s hard to know whether something resonates. I started Creativity Under Capitalism because my friends and I were constantly having questions about how the world’s socioeconomic expectations get in art’s way, but I know you likely have topical thoughts and questions of your own.

This is all to say that I’d love to know what you struggle with at the intersection of creativity and capitalism. What’s been on your mind? What conversations have you had with your own friends, family, or colleagues? If someone could investigate how something works on your behalf—and even look for insights from folks who have overcome creativity-related hurdles before—what would you ask them to look at?

There are no wrong answers here! I just want to hear from you. ⬎

Leave a comment

Now, on to our digital library!

If you feel like you’re losing your mind at the fact that we’re expected to go on with “life as usual” while the world falls apart…

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

A heartrending and poetically powerful indictment of what it’s like to live in a world full of people who turn the other cheek to injustice.

Beyond Climate Breakdown by Peter Friederici

Friederici examines how the stories we (collectively) tell ourselves get in the way of effective climate change action.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

A surprisingly casual fictional exploration of how humanity’s mythologies have convinced us to exploit the world instead of care for it—and how we might break free.

If you’ve felt bogged down lately and need a fun, lightweight read…

The Monk and Robot duology (novellas A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy) by Becky Chambers

Both my partner and I consider this one of our favorite books. It’s like receiving a gentle and loving hug, but through words.

Sourdough by Robin Sloan

A rollicking story of one exhausted Silicon Valley tech worker and the sourdough starter that tries to take over the world. (Bonus points for having one of the best book covers ever.)

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

A brand-new book about robots making noodles for humans living in a near-future, post-war San Francisco.

If you’re interested in catching up on previous Creativity Under Capitalism issues…

(The latest issue that you probably forgot to read.)

(This newsletter’s most popular issue by far.)

(For those who have wondered what ThriftBooks looks like behind the curtain.)

If you’re just getting settled in, check out previous issues of Creativity Under Capitalism—and if you like what you see, consider leaving a comment or buying me a coffee to make my day!

My professional life has changed a lot over the past six months. When I started this newsletter in 2023, I was a freelance writer working just 15-20 hours per week; today, I’m the editor of the site I spent the last four years freelancing for, as well as SFGATE’s part-time Southwest national parks editor—and I continue to freelance here and there. To say I spend a lot of my time and energy writing and revising for work would be an understatement.

But I still write Creativity Under Capitalism every other week, co-lead a weekly creative writing group, and work on a handful of personal writing projects. As proud as I am of my paid work, I don’t feel like myself when I haven’t written creatively for a while; journalism might satisfy the part of my brain that wants my words to fulfill a utilitarian purpose, but fiction and creative nonfiction satisfy my heart.

How can a person move between the two without ripping her hair out of her head? After a long day of editing technology news and drafting long-form pieces about the (soul-crushing) state of the national park system, how can a writer pivot from the rigid confines of practical journalism—or any other paid work, with all its restrictions and rules—to the colorful, boundless world of creative work?

It’s not a matter of simply hitting a switch, I’ve found. When my work began to change in March, I was beyond frustrated that when I shut my work laptop each evening and opened my personal laptop, I failed to enter the creative “zone.” The short story I’d begun writing in October sat untouched for two months, my brain unable to embody its characters or cadence; the novel I’d been stoked about plotting withered, unwatered.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that this resulted in a smattering of meltdowns. I woke up most mornings with a pit in my stomach, worried I had ruined my creative life by devoting more of my time to my professional one. I cried to friends over coffee, convinced that I would never be able to write for myself again. And I was angry. My world had lost its purpose, making all else appear ugly and gray.

After living this way—depressed, distraught, trying desperately to make headway on my creative work and failing—for a few months, I gave up. I accepted, angrily, that maybe my friends and my new therapist were right: In order to achieve one goal, I might have to set down another, at least for a while. In the evenings, instead of cracking open my personal laptop, I turned to baking, which I’d neglected. I started a new game of Ooblets.1 I read.

Not only did this make me a somewhat happier person (imagine that!), but my creative inklings slowly started trickling back. Ideas for Creativity Under Capitalism posts became abundant again. I started jotting down turns of phrase I thought would make good book titles. One night, I even bought a glass of wine at my favorite bookstore and worked on my short story for two hours without glancing at the clock until they were ready to close.

That’s great, Adrianna, you might be thinking, but when does the sex part come in?

Oh, right. That begins with this basic truth, which I learned by accident: Work and creativity rarely live next door to each other.

Let me explain.

, an incredibly clever and compassionate sex educator, published a book last year called Come Together: The Science (and Art) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections, a sequel of sorts to Come As You Are for folks in long-term relationships. As a big fan of Come As You Are with plenty of sexual shame to spare, I snatched it up.

In the book, Nagoski describes something she’s dubbed the “emotional floor plan,” which illustrates how different people move through various mental or emotional states. The premise is that not all emotional states live next to each other, which means reaching a desirable state (in her case, lust) from a less-desirable one (stress, frustration, grief) often involves passing through a third, seemingly unrelated emotion; it’s often impossible to move directly between the undesirable and desired emotions.

Think about it: No matter where you stand inside your house, you’re probably unable to move to all of its rooms without passing through at least one other room along the way.

Per her own floor plan, Nagoski cannot move directly from a “utility” state (housework, errands, writing a book, and so on) to “lust.” Reaching lust first requires her to move through “care” (a mental or physical space focused on nourishment, ensuring one’s needs are met, and even love) and then “play” (laughing together, having fun for fun’s sake, or otherwise embracing lightheartedness). Only then does “lust” finally become accessible. Nagoski can also move from “seeking” (problem-solving, learning something new about a person, exploring novelty) to “lust,” but moving from a fearful, angry, or panicked state to a lustful state is a no-go.

Makes sense, right? If you’ve just experienced a trigger that reminds you of a past trauma, filed a claim with your health insurance provider for the umpteenth time, or put your kid down for a nap after listening to her scream for an hour, it’s probably going to take a few minutes (or more) for you to move into a sexy state of mind. You might want to turn on some fun music, make pancakes for dinner with your partner, enjoy a glass of wine, or go for a walk first—whatever suits your floor plan.

But while Nagoski’s model aims to demonstrate a personalized path toward lust, that’s not all it’s useful for. After all, each person’s floor plan also illustrates how their other mental or emotional states bump up against one another. One person might have an easy time moving from “anger” to “utility”; maybe righteous anger is what fuels their activism, or they find that doing something useful helps to smooth out their emotional tension. For another person, “seeking” and “play” might exist in the same open-concept room, allowing them to move between those states with ease.

Nagoski’s model doesn’t include creativity as an emotional state, but I’ve found that the floorplan concept applies to creativity all the same. When I stopped forcing myself to transition directly from work mode to creative mode (something I never actually pulled off, hence my frustration), I inadvertently gave myself permission to pass through the rooms between utility and creativity. I was no longer asking myself to teleport from one state to another, which would have been impossible; instead, I moved from “utility” to “care,” “play,” and/or “seeking,” which (for me) are sandwiched between work and creativity.

It’s sort of funny, actually—I live in a three-story townhouse, and my office is on the first floor. My living room and kitchen are on the second floor, while my bedroom is on the third. I rarely do any creative writing in my office, since I spend so much time there for work; if I write for myself at home (instead of a coffee shop), it’s usually in the bedroom, where I lie on my stomach and attempt to defend my laptop’s keyboard from my cat.

This means that my emotional floorplan very closely matches my actual, physical floorplan: After I leave “utility” (floor #1), I need to spend a bit of time lounging on the couch, reading, cooking, baking, or playing a game (“care,” “seeking,” and “play” on floor #2) before moving up to “creativity” (or, sure, sometimes “lust,” but my mom and grandma allegedly read this so let’s quickly move on) on floor #3. “Seeking” and “play” activate my curiosity—an integral part of creativity, for me—while “care” ensures I have the energy to create in the first place.

Nagoski is a far more vibrant writer than I, and my explanation certainly pales in comparison with hers. (My example also skips the less-favorable emotional states, like panic and grief, for the sake of clarity and brevity.) But here’s the Tito’s six-times-distilled version of what I’m trying to say: It’s unfair to expect yourself to move directly from your “work brain” to your creative one. You probably need to pass through at least one other mental or emotional state along the way.

So, what does your emotional floor plan look like? What state of mind shakes off your business-casual attire—or your apron or lab coat or whatever else you wear for work—and sets you free to create? Is it a restful state, gained only after a luxurious nap? Or is it a seeking state that you find by jumping through a Wikipedia rabbit hole? Does a juicy, lustful evening jog your creative mind, or are you someone who can effectively turn rage into art?

I know that this is only half of the battle. This extra shift is an inconvenience; in a perfect world, none of us would have to work so much that simply transitioning into a creative mindset is both time-consuming and laborious. If you work overtime or have a child or battle mental illness or go to school part-time or have literally any responsibilities outside of a conventional work life, you probably feel that you don’t have time for this transition.

I’m with you there. The fact that art must come second to the work that puts a roof over my head pisses me off.

But the upside is this: Knowing what it takes for you to move between work and creativity makes that transition much more efficient. If you know that cooking with your partner or going for a run will allow you to step over the creative threshold, you can go do that, rather than wasting your evening wondering what the hell is wrong with you. The former is preferable to the latter, in my book.

What’s been inspiring me lately:

✰ The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More2 by Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb. This brief read is less of a guidebook on how to save money (though there are some excellent practical tips in there) and more of a path toward rethinking your relationship with consumerism. I loved listening to the audiobook version; the Australian narrator is a hoot.

✰ Small Boat, Vincent Delecroix’s excellent novella inspired by the November 2021 English Channel migrant boat disaster. The book is narrated in first-person by the fictionalized woman responsible for the tragedy, and as a former first responder, I found this choice—and the prose itself—beautifully haunting.

If you’re just getting settled in, check out previous issues of Creativity Under Capitalism—and if you like what you see, consider leaving a comment or buying me a coffee to make my day!

No one is 100% immune to clever marketing. Though I’m a skeptic with a decent understanding of how tech startups position themselves online, I, too, am occasionally intrigued by the promise of an aesthetically pleasing, thoughtfully made product that might help me achieve my goals (or at least spice things up in the process).

The Freewrite Alpha is one such product, as are Brick (the little device that “bricks” your smartphone with a quick tap) and the ReMarkable Paper Pro (a tablet that imitates the feel of writing on paper). Over the past year or so, I’ve wondered how—or if—these unusual tools might fit into the life of a busy, tired writer who just wants the creative process to be easier. Would an independent typing device actually free me from distractions, or will I only be as productive as I am with a laptop? Is it worth paying $50 for a piece of plastic that keeps me from accessing Tumblr and text messages on my phone? Might a stylus-equipped tablet save me from sifting through journal after journal for notes I made years ago?

I like to think of myself as an enterprising young writer, and for a minute, I figured I’d buy each of these devices and then review them online. I spent a couple years writing freelance tech reviews, and in general, I know what to look for. But I’m not made of money. Plus, who’s to say my opinion is the one that matters, when plenty of other creatives have coughed up their hard-earned cash for the same reasons I would?

This is my compromise. Rather than gabbing about my thoughts on the Freewrite Alpha, ReMarkable Paper Pro, or whatever other bespoke productivity device that happens to enter the cultural zeitgeist, I’m going to interview other creatives about their experiences with those products. I’ll ask the questions I’d ask myself during a hardware review, plus a few extras, since Creativity Under Capitalism is largely about examining how our money-obsessed culture affects our creative lives. And I’ll throw in the specs for good measure, even though you could easily Google that stuff. I’m not-so-cleverly calling this format the “inter-review”: an interview-style review of a product you may or may not already be interested in.

I’ve seen a lot of folks on Substack interested in Astrohaus’ various Freewrite devices, so we’re kicking off the inter-review series with , author of the newsletter Everything Is Temporary. Jude bought a Freewrite Alpha in May in an attempt to build a distraction-free writing practice. When I saw them post an incredibly adorable picture of their kitten snuggling up against the Alpha, I knew I had to ask them for this review.

For the uninitiated, Freewrite is an 11-year-old brand dedicated to distraction-free writing technology. Under the Michigan-based startup Astrohaus, Freewrite makes four different writing devices—the Alpha, Traveler, Smart Typewriter, and Wordrunner—as well as a free web-based word processor called Sprinter. Each device centers the keyboard, with only a very small screen for viewing what you’ve just typed. The idea is to eliminate all virtual diversions (web browsers, notifications, customization options, and so on), forcing you to actually write when you sit down to do so.

The Alpha is the simplest and most affordable of the Freewrite lineup. It’s basically a modern Alphasmart, with a low-profile mechanical keyboard and a small, plaintext screen that shows a maximum of four lines at a time. Once you’re ready to send what you’ve written to your computer, you can either connect the two devices with a USB-C cable or press a handy “SEND” button to ship the text via wi-fi.

Here are some basic specs:

• Cost (as of July 2025): $349

• Weight: 1.6 lb

• Body material: Polycarbonate (AKA plastic)

• Display size: 164mm x 25mm, anti-glare

• Battery: Lithium-ion, est. 100 hours on a single charge

• Language support: 35 languages, 62 keyboard layouts

Now, on to the review!

Adrianna: How long have you had the Alpha?

Jude: I've had the device for only about 3.5 weeks, and the incredible thing is that I'm about to surpass 25,000 words logged by the time I finish answering these questions. (Yes, I am drafting this on my Alpha—though later, when it came to editing, we switched to a shared Google Doc.)

How much did you personally pay for the device?

I was gearing up to buy the Alpha off the website for full price before, on a whim, checking Facebook Marketplace and finding a barely-used one on sale for $200. I bought it from a grad student one town over who had planned to type out a PhD dissertation on it, but ended up shoving it in a drawer and forgetting about it.

How do you use the Alpha?

I’ve been on medical leave for a few months, so every day is pretty much the same: usually a doctor’s appointment, some errands, and a session with my Alpha. It feels like almost every day, at least—but according to Postbox, which holds my drafts and my writing stats, I’ve written on 18 out of the past 24 days (a respectable 75%).

I use the Alpha to freewrite, i.e. write whatever comes to mind, even if it's not focused or shareable or easily shaped into a piece. But thanks to the Alpha, freewriting has become the bedrock of my writing routine! I type on the device, then email myself what I've written (as easy as clicking the “send” button on the device) and edit on my computer.

Each session can last anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours, though there’s no way I’m actually typing that entire time. (I still have my phone to distract me and get caught up in Google rabbit holes, after all.) I typically write up to about 1,500 words per draft, after which I click the two red “new” buttons together to start a new one.

I usually sit in one of two places: either at an atmospheric cafe, or on my couch (usually with my kitten asleep below my typing arms). Depending on where I am, I might have not much else with me, or I might be surrounded by piles of books that I am theoretically “reading,” though there are so many of them that I’m lucky if I’ve read a couple of pages of each. It’s mostly just me and the Alpha, typing away.

Have you ever traveled with the Alpha?

Last month, I took the Alpha on what was probably the most intense and unproductive European holiday of my life. Constant parenting was involved, and there was no downtime, so the opportunities to write were few and far between. However, I did grab it a couple of times late at night to tap out a few thoughts, and on a train where we had first-class seats. (In second class, I didn’t have the space to whip it out!) Since I don’t have a dedicated case for my Alpha, I threw caution to the wind and my Alpha in my handbag, with zero protection. At one point I dropped it, too. I’m glad to say it survived both careless adventures, but for the risk-averse, I would recommend investing in a protective sleeve. You don’t have to get the official one from Freewrite for $50—anything that fits a 13-inch laptop will fit the Alpha. (I tried using an old laptop case, but I couldn’t bear the reminder of the work laptop I’d carried in it for years.)

Before the Alpha, did you write with a laptop, a desktop computer, both, or neither?

Honestly, before I had the Alpha, I was on a writing dry streak for many months. So not only did the Alpha give me a different way to approach writing, but it also reignited my passion for writing itself. When I was in my last writing period, I mainly used my Mac desktop, but also did some freewriting by hand. I find the Alpha to be a perfect compromise between the two. The past few weeks, I’ve done virtually all my new writing on the Alpha, and all my editing on my Mac, so it’s an easy choice depending on whether I feel like creating new work or building on an existing piece.

What is the Alpha's battery life like, in your experience?

It came to me with about 67% battery, and I’ve never charged it. At this rate, it seems like I will only need to charge it every couple of months. In other words: amazing!

How do you get what you've written on the Alpha to a computer?

To send your work, the first thing you need to make sure is that your Alpha is connected to wi-fi at that moment. (The rest of the time, there is no need, as the Alpha has its own internal storage). Once you’re connected to wi-fi, it’s literally as easy as pressing the button that says “SEND” on it. Moments later, an email arrives in your inbox. The format of the email is plain text, and it comes with both a Word and a PDF attachment. The draft is also uploaded into Postbox, and there’s an option to upload it to your Google Drive, as well. So your draft goes to 3 separate places, and it’s stored on the Alpha itself. I haven’t had any issues whatsoever with this process.

What do you love about the Alpha?

It's the perfect distraction-free place for writing—I just have to remember to put my phone away. The keys feel like something between a computer keyboard and a typewriter: not too soft, but not too clunky. The text you've typed moves off the screen swiftly, so you're not tempted to read back and get wrapped up in how poor your phrasing is or how little structure there is to what you're writing. I like that it's a light device, and doesn't require any peripheral accessories (except for when you’re charging it, which as I said above, is a very rare occurrence). I love that it's not even connected to the internet except for the few seconds that it takes to send the email of a finished session's text.

When it comes to reading what I’ve written on my computer, I've been pleasantly surprised: As I’m writing, it all seems like a flow of nonsense, but every session has actually produced some bits I could shape into an essay or a newsletter issue.

What do you dislike about the Alpha?

There's a lot of room for improvement, actually. The first point is the price. I was lucky enough to get a used version from my community, but a new one will set you back $349. I feel like the $200 I paid is a more reasonable price point.

There is one significant improvement that has been made since the original model that I have, which is that the screen now has a backlight. Without that, I find that I have to turn on all the lights to see what I'm typing.

The other thing that's a bit lacking for me is the kickstand. I find that I need a steeper angle to prop the device up, so I use a pillow on my lap and a book on a table. Not a huge deal, but then why have a kickstand at all? An adjustable one would be ideal. And I do wish that it came with a case (especially for the full price).

Finally, there is a bit of an adjustment period for using the keys. There are lots of secret combinations that you have to learn, so I find myself Googling the instruction manual from time to time.

Do you feel that you can focus more easily and/or avoid "self-editing" with the Alpha?

Yes, if only because trying to edit on it is super annoying! I occasionally switch out a word if it’s not too many lines above and it’s bothering me, but honestly even scrolling from line to line is such a chore that I almost never read anything back that I’ve written until it makes its way off the device and into my email.

Do you feel that the Alpha helped you see the creative process in a new way? If so, do you think you would have come to that realization without this device?

I think the Alpha has released me from feeling like I have to write specific things, thus freeing me up to write at random about whatever comes to mind. Previously I was writing in a structured way, and everyting I wrote had to involve themes that I wanted to include in my memoir, but it limited my creativity. Now I write about a broader range of themes and sometimes write on topics that are completely random and don't connect to the rest of my writing. I'm not sure I would have gained that freedom without this device.

As a person with ADHD, do you find that the Alpha helps mitigate ADHD-related obstacles?

Absolutely. I think it helps me enter into a state of flow, which is where you feel both competent and engaged.

If a friend told you they were struggling to focus on their writing and could afford the Alpha, would you recommend it to them? What tips would you give them, if they purchased it?

Absolutely—if it fits your budget, it’s a no-brainer! You’re going to want to bookmark this page so that you don’t have to memorize all those key combos right off the bat. Also, because the device can't remember multiple wi-fi credentials, connect it to your phone hotspot and turn on the hotspot to send the email. Then it doesn't matter whether you're at home or out and about.

Do you own a Freewrite device? If so, what do you think of it? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!

Also, if there are any bespoke creativity devices you’d like to see reviewed, drop the name below!